Get started with Spring Tools Suite 4
The easiest way to get started with Spring Boot, by far, is to download and install the Eclipse distribution that comes pre-packaged with the Spring Tools Suite. Here's how to do it.
Software development and Spring Boot
At minimum, to be a productive software developer, a Java programmer must have access to the following three items:
- The Java Development Kit.
- A build tool, such as Maven or Gradle.
- An IDE that simplifies software development.
You could spend a morning installing all these tools and then waste an afternoon configuring them. But you can get all these tools pre-configured in a single, downloadable zip file.
The Spring Tools Suite and Eclipse package, downloadable from the Spring site, offers an enterprise-grade IDE preconfigured with all the required tools and dependencies. Your only barrier to entry into the world of Spring software development is the amount of time it takes to download and unzip a 700 MB file.
Spring Tools 4 prerequisites
The prerequisites and system requirements are minimal. If you have hardware that supports Windows 10 or Ubuntu 24, you'll have no issues installing Spring Tools and Eclipse.
In the video, I demonstrate the download and installation of the Spring Tools Suite with Eclipse on a 12-year-old Intel desktop with only 4 GB of RAM. The OS is the soon-to-be retired Windows 10.
Yet despite these modest hardware and software specs, the installation is fast, and the IDE is responsive.
After the install, a Maven-based Spring Boot application is created. It leverages Spring Web MVC and RestController to create a simple "Hello World!" Spring app that runs on a Tomcat server, and there isn't any noticeable lag from the IDE.
How to install Spring Tools Suite with Eclipse
The steps to follow to install the full Spring Tools Suite with Eclipse are as follows:
- Download the Eclipse and Spring Tools package from Spring.io.
- Extract the contents of the zip file to your local filesystem.
- The extraction will contain a file named contents.zip. Extract this zip file as well.
- Double-click on the file named SpringToolSuite4.exe to start Eclipse.
- Use the Spring Starter link in Eclipse to create a cloud-native Spring Boot app.
That's it. That's how easy it is to get started with Spring Boot and Eclipse.
Learn Spring fast
Once you install and configure the IDE, I highly recommend you jump right into Spring Boot development. Expose yourself to the tooling and the APIs, and you'll learn Spring surprisingly fast.
To start, create a simple Spring Boot "Hello World!" app as a quick smoke test to ensure everything is configured properly. After that, try the following tasks and explore how easy Spring Boot makes enterprise software development:
- Build a RESTful API with Spring Boot.
- Create a standalone Spring Boot app that hits a database with Spring JDBC.
- Connect to a database with Spring JDBC and a preconfigured H2 database.
- Explore Spring Boot annotations like @Controller, @Configuration, @ComponentScan and @EnableAutoConfiguration.
- Map Java objects to tables and columns with Spring JPA.
- Create secure, server-side web applications with Spring Web MVC.
- Test your RESTful APIs with OpenAPI and Swagger.
- Create your own ChatGPT wrapper with Spring AI.
- Dockerize your Spring Boot apps and deploy to AWS.
With the Spring Tools Suite installed and configured in Eclipse, the world is your oyster when it comes to developing enterprise-grade Java software and cloud-native microservices.
Cameron McKenzie has been a Java EE software engineer for 20 years. His current specialties include Agile development; DevOps; Spring; and container-based technologies such as Docker, Swarm and Kubernetes.