This section explains the relationship between STS3 and Spring Tools for Eclipse (aka Spring Tools).

The default Spring Tools distribution for Eclipse (aka Spring Tools) comes with several components pre-installed that you are well familiar with from using STS3. Those components/features are:

• Boot Dashboard
• Snippet Completion Proposals for Request Mappings
• Spring Properties and YAML file editing support (although the Spring Tools version is slightly different)
• Conversion of Spring Properties file to YAML file
• Spring Starter wizard (https://start.spring.io)
• Import Getting Started Content wizard (https://spring.io/guides)
• Quick Search

Open Symbol in Workspace features replaces it. Once the Open Symbol in Workspace dialog is opened type @/ to see all Request Mappings in the workspace.

There is no graph for the Live Beans, but there is information about Live Beans available in a different form:

• Live Bean data is available via Boot highlights, hovers and Code Lenses in the source code
• List of Live beans data is shown in the Beans tab in the Properties View for a selected running Boot application

Since Spring Tools is re-implemented from scratch, the tooling had a sharp focus for the initial release. Spring Tools focus on supporting Spring developers using Spring Boot and annotation-style Spring programming. Therefore, the following features of STS3 were NOT supported in the initial releases of the Spring Tools 4:

• Spring XML config validations
• advanced content-assist in Spring XML config files
• advanced refactoring refactoring in Spring XML config files

Since version 4.1.1, the Spring Tools started to include early experimental support and first steps towards proving support for Spring XML configuration files and non-Boot projects and version 4.2.1 followed up with that by adding early (and limited) support for content-assist for certain elements of Spring XML config files. You can follow the progress here:

• XML config support in Spring Tools (#108)
• make Spring Tools features available for non-boot Spring apps (#96)

In case you would like to continue to use specific features of STS3 that are not part of Spring Tools yet and use the new Spring Tools at the same time, you can apply two different strategies:

• use separate workspaces and continue to use STS3 for specific workspaces while using Spring Tools for new workspaces
• install STS3 components into an Spring Tools installation

You can install the old STS3 tooling into an existing Spring Tools distribution and use both side-by-side in the same workspace. This is not strongly recommended, but possible and supported.

In order to achieve that, you can use a fresh Spring Tools distribution for Eclipse and go to the Eclipse Marketplace to install the "STS3 Add-On Extension" item. It will install all the well-known STS3 components into your Spring Tools installation.

This works for the Eclipse-based distribution of the Spring Tools only. There is no way to install or use STS3 components in Visual Studio Code or Atom.