Martin Lippert

Martin Lippert

Developer Tools Engineering, Spring Tool Suite Lead | Hamburg, Germany

Martin leads the Spring Tools projects at VMware to provide the best developer tools out there for Spring. In addition to that he works on next generation developer tooling and innovative new architectures for cloud-based developer tooling. Before joining the Spring family, Martin co-founded it-agile, a leading consulting and development company focused on agile software development.
Blog posts by Martin Lippert

Spring Tools 4.18.0 released

Releases | March 15, 2023 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.18.0 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

updates to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

important highlights

  • (Spring Boot): new and vastly improved content-assist for Spring Data repository query methods (thanks to contributions from @danthe1st)
  • (Spring Boot): the additional reconciling of Spring Boot projects to show Spring specific validations, outdated versions and more, now reports progress, runs faster, and uses less memory - please consider using this and tell us about your experiences and if you hit issues while having this feature enabled
  • (VSCode): fixed an extremely annoying issue that caused regular Java content-assist in VSCode to stop working after a short while
  • (Eclipse): a bug in m2e got fixed and is included in this release, which caused resource files (e.g. application.properties) to not be copied into the target folder anymore. This works again and automatically copies your changed application.properties

Spring Tools 4.17.2 released

Releases | February 01, 2023 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.17.2 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

updates to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

  • early-access builds for upcoming Eclipse 2023-03 release available via update site

fixes and improvements

  • (Spring Boot) fixed: [symbols] do not auto-limit the result of the workspace symbol request (#915)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: Unit test MavenProjectParser (#918)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: Give user more information about what is "java sources reconciling" (#920)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: [Java-17] Enable jdt.ls.commons.test tests to execute in the maven build (#928)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: update generated parser for Java properties with latest ANTLR runtime version (#946)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: Bad Escape exception showing up in log (#950)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: various exceptions while reconciling (#951)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: NPE from OpenRewrite Java Parser - Cannot read field "info" because "env" is null (#952

The new Spring Boot version validation and upgrade support in Spring Tools

Engineering | January 17, 2023 | ...

New releases of Spring Boot are being released on a quite frequent schedule and updating your projects to newer versions of Spring Boot is something that many teams and organizations around the globe do as part of their daily work.

Sometimes those upgrades are simple and easy, for example for new patch releases that mostly include changes to fix bugs and address CVEs. In contrast to that, upgrading to a new minor or even a new major version requires more work, including code changes to adapt to new or changed APIs, updating configurations to not use deprecated keys anymore, and more.

Each new minor or major version of Spring therefore ships with a comprehensive guide and documentation about those changes and you can read and follow to upgrade your project. A good example of this is the new migration guide for upgrading your projects to Spring Boot 3

Spring Tools 4.17.1 released

Releases | January 03, 2023 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.17.1 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

fixes and improvements

  • (Spring Boot) fixed: Eclipse STS 4.17 takes 96 % processor time on Intel i9 (#934)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: BootLanguageServerBootApp class is taking all available cpu continuously (#932)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: OpenRewrite unchecked, but always Language Server Background Job(Loading Rewrite Recipes) (#925)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: [validation] spring.factories EnableAutoConfiguration key for boot 3.0 ignores 'on' setting (#917)
  • (VSCode) fixed: [vscode] Boot LS is broken if Java LS launch mode is 'Hybrid' (#919)

Spring Tools 4.17.0 released

Releases | December 07, 2022 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.17.0 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

major changes to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

early access to new experimental features

Among a number of bug fixes and minor improvements, this release introduces experimental support for:

  • Spring Boot version validations: The IDE will tell you when there is a newer major, minor, or patch version available for your Spring Boot project
  • Spring Boot upgrade support: The tooling will help you upgrading your existing projects to newer Spring Boot versions, including upgrades to newer patch and minor versions, as well as newer major versions (e.g. upgrading to Spring Boot 3)
  • Spring specific validations and refactorings: The…

Spring Tools 4.16.1 released

Releases | October 26, 2022 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.16.1 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

major changes to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

  • early access builds available for Spring Tools 4 on Eclipse 2022-12 milestones

important note for upgrading from a release prior to 4.16.0 on Eclipse

fixes and improvements

  • (Spring Boot) fixed: Spring XML Config support does not show symbols with scope "File" (#860)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: [open-rewrite] exception when executing quick fix for project (#853)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: [refactoring] quick fix to convert autowired field to constructor param shows up even if the constructor param already exists (#815)
  • (VSCode) fixed: Vscode Spring Boot Tools 1.39.0 prevents Java project from Running/Debugging (#847)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: Web Tools Platform (WTP) validation is activated by default (#859)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: ask user to save dirty editors before deploying on docker (#803

Spring Tools 4.16.0 released

Releases | September 16, 2022 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.16.0 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

major changes to the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution

  • updated to Eclipse 2022-09 release (new and noteworthy)
  • new distribution build for Linux on ARM included now (experimental) - downloads are here
  • m2e 2.0.5 release included in distribution builds for Eclipse

important note for upgrading from a previous installation on Eclipse

  • Due to the major update to m2e 2.0 that comes with the Eclipse 2022-09 release, several additional third-party m2e connector extensions that the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution had installed in the past are no longer compatible. This prevents the automatic update of installations of Spring Tools prior to 4.16.0 to the new release. There are two options how to mitigate this:
    • start with a fresh install of Spring Tools 4.16.0 for Eclipse
    • go to the Preferences -> Installation Details and uninstall the following features via the Uninstall button, then restart the IDE, do a Check for Updates, and do the upgrade.
      • Maven Integration for Eclipse JDT Annotation Processor Toolkit
      • m2e connector for mavenarchiver pom properties
      • m2e connector for build-helper-maven-plugin

Spring Tools 4.15.3 released

Releases | August 12, 2022 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.15.3 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

fixes and improvements

  • (Spring Boot) fixed: Spring Boot Tools slow down code complete (#808)
  • (Language Server) fixed: Copied files should retain copyright ownership (#807)

To download the distribution for Eclipse and find links to the marketplace entries for Visual Studio Code and Theia, please go visit:

Detailed changes can be found here: https://github.com/spring-projects/sts4/wiki/Changelog#2022-08-11-4153-release…

Spring Tools 4.15.2 released

Releases | August 04, 2022 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.15.2 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

fixes and improvements

  • (Spring Boot) fixed: Validation errors on @@ placeholders in YAML editor (#711)
  • (VSCode) fixed: Live process is not auto connected when app is launched in internalConsole (#794)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: Cleanup / reduce verbosity of diagnostic output in Eclipse logs (#798)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: Not properly disposed SWT resource was caused Spring Starter Project (#797)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: avoid live hover connection attempt when deploying app to docker without actuator (#716)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: Devtools integration with boot dash docker is broken (#724)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: Pause / Resume for docker boot dash malfunctions (#783

Spring Tools 4.15.1 released

Engineering | June 18, 2022 | ...

Dear Spring Community,

I am happy to announce the 4.15.1 release of the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

fixes and improvements

  • (Spring Boot) fixed: VScode incorrectly suggests removing @Autowired annotation from methods (#787)
  • (Spring Boot) fixed: VScode quick fix should not suggest removing @Autowired annotation from JUnit tests (#786)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: Not able to extract the new version of spring-tool-suite-4-4.15.0.RELEASE-e4.24.0-win32.win32.x86_64.self-extracting.jar on windows 11 (#788)
  • (Eclipse) fixed: Cannot open Spring Boot Language Server Java Editor settings menu (#789)

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