I’ve been doing work with the SpringFramework now for about 3 years. It has been a very steep learning curve - occasionally I feel like I’m rock climbing! I started off using SpringIDE which is an open source commercial free Eclipse plugin which can aid the development of Java EE projects that use Spring. The difference between SpringIDE and Spring Tool Suite is small but subtle. SpringIDE is an Eclipse plugin where as the Spring Tool Suite is an entire version of Eclipse pre-configured with all the plug-ins SpringSource thinks you need. It even has a Spring Source splash screen when it is loading. In early 2009, SpringSource (the owners of the Spring Framework) decided to change the licence agreement of Spring Tool Suite (STS) so that it could be made freely available for development and internal business operations to use with no time limits. I’ve been using STS for a while and I recently needed to report a bug against it. But could I find where to do it? No. I searched for a couple of days and eventually had to ask in the forums. So I write this blog to help anyone else who gets lost down the rat runs of confusion between SpringIDE and STS. The big problem with reporting bugs is where do you go to do it. SpringIDE and Spring Tool Suite are both tightly coupled to Eclipse, they both have JIRA issue trackers, they are both tightly integrated into Spring and they both have Spring personnel on the support team. I suspect that in the long term SpringIDE will die as STS has loads of extra value adds and is considered the standard eclipse plugin. So to find where to report bugs:

1. Load your Eclipse environment
2. In the menus navigate to Help -> About Eclipse
3. Click the green SpringSource icon, which opens the About Eclipse Feature window
4. Click the link for the product page: http://springsource.com/products/sts
5. When the web page loads in click the link for Bug and Enhancement Database in the Related Content section

if it ever disappears again from the Related Content position (like before) then you will have to hunt around for it which was the problem before. So here it is: https://issuetracker.springsource.com/browse/STS For completeness you can report bugs against SpringIDE here: http://jira.springframework.org/browse/IDE/ According to Christian Dupuis, who is the Spring bod who looks after the SpringIDE and STS, you can raise JIRA issues on the STS Jira for both SpringIDE and STS.