How To Create Spring Boot Project In Eclipse

Java programming language is often said to be too complicated and cumbersome in terms of building simple applications. However, Java provides a stable platform that offers an extremely mature ecosystem which makes it possible for developers to create robust software without much hassle. 

The Spring Framework – one of the many powerful frameworks present in the Java ecosystem – brings with it a collection of configuration and programming models to simplify the development and testing of applications in Java. 

In this article, we’ll go through some of the useful features of the STS IDE (Eclipse Spring Tool Suite), which are useful for you when developing Spring Boot projects or applications in Eclipse. We’ll talk about the various benefits of STS as opposed to the traditional way of building Spring applications with Eclipse. 

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Then, we’ll look at how to bootstrap an application, how to execute it, and eventually, how to add additional dependencies. Finally, we’ll conclude this tutorial by adding applications arguments. 

Main Features of STS 

Spring Tool Suite, short for STS, is a development environment based on Eclipse that is specifically customized for creating seamless Spring Boot projects and applications. 

STS provides a ready-to-use environment for developers for implementing, debugging, running, and deploying their Spring applications. STS also includes integration for Pivotal tc Server, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Git, Maven, and AspectJ. 

Spring Tool Suite is a suite that’s built as an additional layer on top of the latest Eclipse releases. 

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Project Configuration

STS understands all the basic Java project structures. The tool parses configuration files and displays detailed information about the defined beans, injected dependencies, used namespaces, and extracts overviews for certain stereotypes. 

STS Features Overview

Eclipse STS provides quick fixes for your Spring applications while validating your project. For instance, when you are working with Spring Data JPA, the Eclipse IDE may be used to validate query method names.

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Spring Tool Suite also provides an easy to understand the graphical view of the various bean methods and the relationships they hold. If you want to take a closer look at the different graphical editors that come with STS, you can check the views that are available under the menus window, show view, and then Spring respectively.

The STS also offers developers additional features that are not limited to the applications of Spring. You can check the full list of features here.

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Creating a Spring Application

Let’s start by bootstrapping a simple application. Without STS, the Spring application can be created using the Spring Initializer website or the Spring Boot CLI. This can be further simplified by clicking on Create Spring Starter Project from the STS dashboard.

In the ‘New Spring Starter Project’ screen, either use the default settings or make the required adjustments as per your project, and then go to the next screen. There, select ‘Web’ and click finish.

Your pom.xml should now look something like this:

<parent>

    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>

    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-parent</artifactId>

    <version>2.4.0</version>

    <relativePath/> <!– lookup parent from repository –>

</parent>

<properties>

    <project.build.sourceEncoding>UTF-8</project.build.sourceEncoding>

    <java.version>1.8</java.version>

</properties>

<dependencies>

    <dependency>

        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>

        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-web</artifactId>

    </dependency>

    <dependency>

        <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>

        <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-test</artifactId>

        <scope>test</scope>

    </dependency>

</dependencies>

If you’re running an older version fo Spring Boot, please find the latest version here.

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Running the Application

The previously mentioned application can be started by simply right-clicking on the project and selecting ‘run as Spring Boot App’. Without STS, you can run the application from CLI using the following commands: 

$ mvn spring-boot:run

By default, the Spring applications are started with Tomcat that runs on port 8080. At this point, the applications start on port 8080 but don’t perform any task as we haven’t implemented any code in it yet. 

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Logging and ANSI Console

When you execute the project from your IDE using the ‘run’ command, you’ll find that the console outputs some colour-coded log statements. In case you want to turn these statements off, you can go to ‘run configurations’ and disable the checkbox that says ‘Enable ANSI console output on the Spring Boot tab’. 

Alternatively, you can also disable the logging statements by setting a properties value in the applications.properties file like this: 

spring.output.ansi.enabled=NEVER

JPA Query Name Checks

At times, implementing a data access layer may turn into a cumbersome activity. A lot of boilerplate code may need to be written to realize extremely simple queries and perform pagination.  Spring Data JPA aims to seamlessly facilitate such an implementation of data access layers. 

To get started, add the following dependency for JPA to the previously generated pom.xml:

<dependency>

    <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>

    <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>

</dependency>

<dependency>

    <groupId>com.h2database</groupId>

    <artifactId>h2</artifactId>

</dependency>

You might have noticed that your version has not been specified in the above declaration. This is because of the fact that dependencies are managed by the spring-boot-starter-parent. 

To make the JPA work, you’ll need to properly define entity and transaction managers for your project. However, working with Spring auto-configures these values for you. The only thing left to do from your end is to create the actual entity classes. 

These entities are managed by the entity manager which is created by the container. Let’s create an entity class called Foo: 

@Entity

public class Foo implements Serializable {

    @Id

    @GeneratedValue

    private Integer id;

    private String name;

 

    // Standard getters and setters

}

The container will scan all the classes annotated with @Entity from the root of the configuration package. 

Next, let’s create JPA repository for the Foo entity:

public interface FooRepository extends JpaRepository<Foo, Integer> {

    public Foo findByNames(String name);

}

At this stage, you might have already noticed that your IDE now flags this query method with the following exception: 

Invalid derived query! No property names found for type Foo!

This happens due to the fact that you have accidentally written an extra ‘s’ at the end of the method name of the JPA repository. To fix this exception, remove the extra s and make it like: 

public Foo findByName(String name);

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Jar Type Search

Jar Type Search is a feature that was introduced in the 3.5.0 version of STS. This feature provides content-assisted proposals for classes that aren’t yet in the classpath. STS helps developers in adding dependencies to their POM files, in case they aren’t on the classpath. 

For instance, let us add a line to the Foo entity class. For this to work properly, please ensure that the import statement for java.util.List is already present. 

Now we may add Google Guava as follows:

private List<String> strings = Lists // ctrl + SPACE to get code completion

The IDE then suggests several dependencies to be added to the classpath. Add these dependencies from com.google.common.collect, press return, and add the dependency from Guava. 

The Guava jar will automatically be added to your pom.xml file like following:

<dependency>

    <groupId>com.google.guava</groupId>

    <artifactId>guava</artifactId>

    <version>19.0</version>

</dependency>

Adding Application Arguments

One of the most powerful features of the Spring framework is the support of external configurations that can be passed to applications in several ways – as a command-line argument, specified in properties of YAML files, or as system properties. Let’s look at how to add a configuration option as an application start argument using STS. 

This is illustrated by configuring Tomcat to start on a different port.

In order to run a Spring application on a Tomcat port other than the default (8080) one, you need to use the command below. In the following command, a custom port is specified as the command line argument. 

mvn spring-boot:run -Drun.arguments=”–server.port=7070″

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Conclusion

In this article, we went through how to execute Spring projects and applications in STS. However, this is not all – there are many more useful features that can be utilized during the development process. While this tutorial was good to get you started with creating Spring Boot Project in Eclipse STS, remember that there’s a lot for you to explore and experiment from. 

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