News

MyEclipse for Spring Released

• By John K. Waters
• October 13, 2010

The collaboration between MyEclipse creator Genuitec and Spring development tools maker Skyway Software, announced in January, bore fruit this week in the form of a new version of the MyEclipse IDE. The new MyEclipse for Spring STS Edition is a jointly developed plug-in for the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS). It's designed to allow developers to use their code anyway they want without vendor or aspects lock-in.

The new plug-in is designed to allow developers to "scaffold" the Google Web Toolkit (GWT), Spring MVC, Spring Web Flow, Adobe Flex and Apple iPhone applications simultaneously, which is a capability not found in the STS or the Spring Roo dev tool. Scaffolding is generated from multiple types of existing data sources.

A common pain point for developers using STS and Roo is that they require them to use unfamiliar, domain-driven design patterns, said Todd Williams, Genuitec's vice president of technology. The result is that Spring technologies are less accessible to the enterprise. "By bringing MyEclipse for Spring's easy code editors, wizards and scaffolding capabilities directly into the STS environment, developers are entirely free to utilize high-quality Spring tooling, but now have flexible coding options which use the controller, service, domain, and DAO architecture patterns they're already familiar with," he said in a statement.

Texas-based Genuitec bills MyEclipse as both a comprehensive Java EE IDE and a Web development tool suite for the Eclipse platform. The company promotes the tool for developers using UML, JSP, XML, Struts, JSF and EJBs. It supports Ajax, Web Services development, Java Persistence, extended database support, and application server integration, the company said. Genuitec is a founding member of the Eclipse Foundation.

Tampa, Fl.-based Skyway Software is a provider of an open-source code generation tool and scaffolding for Spring-based Web application development. The company's Skyway Builder is an Eclipse-based code generation tool for Spring apps. Skyway also provides a model-centric development and deployment environment called Visual Perspectives, which focuses on Web services and RIAs for Spring and Spring MVC.

Skyway president Sean Walsh sees the two companies' technologies as particularly complementary. "We serve the same software developer market but offer different products that complement each other extremely well," he said in a statement. "Now that Skyway Builder runs seamlessly inside of MyEclipse, we have the reach to bring our powerful Spring development accelerators into the hands of millions of Java and Spring developers."

Spring is a layered Java/J2EE framework based on code published in the book Expert One-on-One Java EE Design and Development (Wrox Press, October 2002), by SpringSource co-founder Rod Johnson. He also wrote the first version of the framework, and now serves as general manager of the SpringSource division of VMware.

More information about the MyEclipse for Spring STS Edition plug-in is available here.