spring boot suite - independant IDE or is it a plugin for other IDE such as Eclipse

Question

I am new to spring boot. One thing that puzzles me is that is spring boot suite a standalone IDE? ie Does it behave like a regular IDE?

Or is it just an add-on or plugin that must be used in conjunction with an exisiting IDE, eg eclipse etc?

Please clarity.

Thank you.

Answer 1

The Spring Tools 4 are available as extensions for a number of IDEs, including the Eclipse IDE, Visual Studio Code, and Theia.

For your convenience, we also provide a ready-to-use distribution of the Eclipse IDE with the Spring Tools 4 pre-installed, among a few other useful extensions. This is what most people refer to as the Spring Tool Suite.

So you have the choice to either download one of the mentioned IDEs and install the Spring Tools 4 extensions into them yourself or - in case of Eclipse - download the ready-to-use Spring Tool Suite from https://spring.io/tools (which is the Eclipse IDE + Spring Tools 4 pre-installed and branded).

As a beginner, I would recommend to start with the Spring Tools 4 for Eclipse distribution (aka Spring Tool Suite). As it is a regular Eclipse IDE under the hood, you can instal additional extensions into it in the same way than into a pure Eclipse IDE - in case you want to customize it further at a later point in time.

Hope this explains it.