Setting up the development environment

Spring projects are usually created as Java projects based in Maven, Gradle, or Ivy (which are build automation and dependency management tools). You can easily create a Maven-based Spring project using STS or Eclipse with Spring Tools support. You need to make sure your pom.xml (Maven configuration) file contains, at the minimum, a dependency to spring-context:

<dependencies>
  <dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-context</artifactId>
    <version>${spring-framework.version}</version>
  </dependency>
  ...
</dependencies>

Of course, you should add further dependencies to modules such as spring-tx, spring-data-jpa, spring-webmvc, and hibernate, depending on your project type and requirements.

Unless you explicitly specify the repository location, your project works with Maven's central repository. Alternatively, you can point to Spring's official Maven repository (for example, for milestones and snapshots) by specifying it in your pom.xml file:

<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>io.spring.repo.maven.milestone</id>
        <url>http://repo.spring.io/milestone/</url>
        <snapshots><enabled>false</enabled></snapshots>
    </repository>
</repositories>

You can use the Spring release, milestone, and snapshot repositories as required.

If you are using Gradle as your build system, you can declare your dependencies (typically in the build.gradle file) as follows:

dependencies {
    compile('org.springframework:spring-context')
    compile('org.springframework:spring-tx')
    compile('org.hibernate:hibernate-entitymanager')
    testCompile('junit:junit')
}

If you prefer using the Ivy dependency management tool, then your Spring dependency configuration will look like this:

<dependency org="org.springframework"
    name="spring-core" rev="4.2.0.RC3" conf="compile->runtime"/>