Review of STS 3.5.0.M2

STS 3.5.0.M2 experience so far

After a weekend of grueling frustration trying to convert a Spring Boot application to a war file so as to be able to deploy it to a normal (as opposed to embedded) Tomcat server using STS 3.0.4 release, I was nearly ready to give up and seek out another IDE when I suddenly noticed that Pivotal had just announced the release of STS version 3.5.0.M2.  I figured I had nothing to lose, so why not try it?

What follow are my impressions so far based on some very short (under 1 hour) experiences, and for those who want to cut to the chase, I will just say that my entire weekend of frustration was just *vanquished* within ten minutes of starting STS 3.5.0.M2!!!

I began by testing the critical application I was stuck on all weekend using STS 3.0.4:

gs-convert-jar-to-war

First I added the [new] source from the new dashboard via “Import Getting Started Guide”

• chose maven as project type since gradle seemed greyed out

1. Run--> Maven install

BUILD SUCCESS. . . but

        [WARNING] The requested profile "pom.xml" could not be activated because it does not exist.

SUCCESS!  

Davids-MacBook-Pro:gs-convert-jar-to-war-complete dave$ find . -name "gs-convert*.?ar" -print

./target/gs-convert-jar-to-war-0.1.0.war

1. Run As—> Spring Boot (Hello World runs as expected).
2. Deploy war onto Tomcat on another server - works as expected:

http://davemclure.myeffect.net/gs-convert-jar-to-war-0.1.0

I am still savoring this!  Meanwhile, no time to waste - I am back to tinkering.  More reports to follow, but just know that you should definitely not wait to download STS 3.5.0.M2!