SpringSource has announced a major release of their Eclipse-based developer tool, SpringSource Tool Suite 3.0. According to the website, this is a major release not only in terms of new features but because of the product’s new componentization, open sourcing, and availability of multiple distributions.

The Spring Tool Suite (STS) is a full distribution of the organization’s Eclipse-based tool. It includes support for the Spring Core framework itself, Spring Integration, Spring Batch, and Spring WebFlow visual development tools, as well as Spring Roo, the latest Eclipse Integration for Maven. Included with STS is the developer edition of vFabric tc Server, the drop-in replacement for Apache Tomcat that’s optimized for Spring. With the Spring Insight console, tc Server Developer Edition provides a graphical real-time view of application performance metrics.

The Groovy/Grails Tool Suite is a full distribution of the Eclipse-based tool that is customized for Groovy and Grails development. It has Groovy-Eclipse pre-installed as well as support for direct deployment to the tc Server. And, it comes with a ready-to-use Grails installation as part of the distribution. The tool suite is built on top of the latest Eclipse Juno 4.2 release and provides a ready-to-use experience for Groovy-Grails users.

To allow for individual installation and better modularization, the developers have separated the different parts into individual component projects. According to the website, the projects all live at GitHub and can be installed into a plain Eclipse JEE installation individually. Additionally, all parts of the tool suites are open sourced under the Eclipse Public License at GitHub under the SpringSource organization at GitHub.