On August 31 of 2004, only a few months after version 1.0 of the Spring Framework itself got released, Torsten Jürgeleit created a repository and made the initial commits to a project that became the tooling support for Spring in Eclipse, the Spring IDE project (while the roots of that work are probably going back further in time, as the comment of the first commit to the repository reads like there was a CVS repository even before that time.). Shortly after, Christian Dupuis joined, led the project for many years and initiated the Spring Tool Suite on top of Spring IDE.

It’s been a long time since then.

On December 4 of 2017, a new chapter for the Spring tooling began with the introduction of the all-new Spring Tools 4 and its first public beta release, followed by the first GA release made publicly available on September 25, 2018.

Since the first beta announcement of Spring Tools 4 in 2017, we continued to ship update and maintenance releases of the Spring Tool Suite 3 and the Spring IDE projects for the convenience of existing users on a regular basis, giving our existing users plenty of time to upgrade their coding environments to Spring Tools 4.

Today, this maintenance and update phase of Spring Tool Suite 3 and related Spring IDE projects come to an end. The version 3.9.22 of the Spring Tool Suite 3 and Spring IDE - that we shipped on April 28, 2022 and is compatible with the Eclipse 2022-03 release - will be the last and final release that we ship. We will no longer provide maintenance updates and we will not provide updates to make Spring IDE components compatible with Eclipse 2022-06 or other versions to come.

During all the years, we always followed the same goals and principles for the tooling: Make you as a developer using Spring more productive. We will continue that journey.

The Spring Tools 4 are based on a whole new tooling architecture and created a solid new foundation for many years to come for the Spring tooling. As of today, the Spring Tools 4 is the top 1 downloaded extension for Eclipse on the Eclipse Marketplace and has about 1.5 Million installs on the Visual Studio Code marketplace alone.

If you haven’t yet upgraded your coding environment to Spring Tools 4 - either on Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, GitHub Codespaces, Gitpod, Eclipse Theia, or other compatible development environments, now is the time to join us for Spring Tools 4. The Spring Tools 4 user guide contains useful information and assistance for that step.

If you would like to share your feedback, have questions around this transition to Spring Tools 4, or want to ask the tools team other questions with regards to this announcement, please comment on this issue on GitHub.

The next release of Spring Tools 4 is right around the corner, our stable release cycle ships updates around every 6 weeks, and we will continue to drive innovation in this space with future releases. A number of cool new things are in the works, and will arrive with one of our upcoming releases of Spring Tools 4. Stay tuned.