Spring Tools, a suite of tools to help create Spring applications in a variety of IDEs, is now available in v4.3. It is the first version to officially work with cloud and desktop IDE Eclipse Theia aside from Eclipse and Visual Studio Code.

This however leaves users of another Electron based IDE (funnily enough one that isn’t that closely linked to Eclipse) standing: Support for Atom has been deprecated with the 4.3 release, as is pointed out in the release announcement.

Although the tool repository as well as the Spring website still tout Atom support for Spring Tools 4 at this time, developers that want to use future versions of Spring Tools with the editor will have to step up themselves. Anyone who’d like to see support for the platform continue and therefore put work into Atom tooling, is asked to contact the Spring team.

Development environment questions aside, Spring Tools has been fitted with a couple of fixes and improvements since the last release, which includes the recreation of symbols in Spring Boot, should dependent types change. To speed up processes on the Eclipse side, Boot now works in batch on startup when it comes to project classpath notifications.

Those having trouble with content-assist for Spring XML configuration files can try again after updating to v4.3 since earlier issues with VS Code and Theia have been fixed. Eclipse users meanwhile shouldn’t run into failures when restarting apps multiple times via the boot dashboard anymore. Issues regarding the deleting of apps with active SSH tunnels have been mitigated as well.

A complete list of changes, including fixes to the CF Manifest editor, can be found on GitHub, where the tools are hosted under the Eclipse Public License.

Spring Tools is an open source project backed by Pivotal Software, which is mainly known for its big data products and the platform as a service project Cloud Foundry. It is meant to help developers struggling with using the Spring Framework to build business applications for the Java platform, by providing code completion, runtime information and the like in different editors.