Time for action – installing Spring Tool Suite

STS is the best Eclipse-powered development environment to build Spring applications. Let's take a look at how we can install STS:

1. Go to the STS download page at http://spring.io/tools/sts/all.
2. Click on the STS installer .exe link to download the file that corresponds to your windows operating system architecture type (32 bit or 62 bit); this will start the download of the installer. The STS stable release version at the time of writing this book is STS 3.4.0.RELEASE based on Eclipse 4.3.1.
3. Once the download is finished, go to the downloaded directory and double-click on the installer; this will open up a wizard window.
4. Just click through the next buttons in the wizard, leaving the default options alone; if you want to customize the installation directory, you can specify that in the steps you perform in the wizard.

   Tip

   Downloading the example code

   You can download the example code files for all Packt books you have purchased from your account at http://www.packtpub.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit http://www.packtpub.com/support and register to have the files e-mailed directly to you.

5. In step 5 of the wizard, you have to provide the JDK path; just enter the JDK path that you configured for the JAVA_HOME environment variable, as shown in the following screenshot:
   

   Setting the JDK path during the STS installation

We have almost installed all the tools and software required to develop a Spring MVC application, so now, we can create our Spring MVC project on STS. However, before jumping into creating a project, we need to perform a final configuration for STS.