New version of the Eclipse plugin delivers Web Flow support, enhanced Spring 2.0 support

The Spring IDE team has released Spring IDE 2.0 M3, which among other new features includes the highly-anticipated Spring Web Flow graphical visualizer and editor.  The new support allows developers to edit XML-based flow definitions graphically, and enables greater productivity and communication with end users.

In addition to the graphical piece, Spring IDE 2.0 M3 also delivers a Web Flow XML editor that provides content assist and semantic validation to improve the quality of your flow definitions.

To illustrate the essence of some of these new features, consider the classic Master / Detail Search flow demonstrated by the Phonebook sample application:

Here is the same flow visualized with the new Spring IDE Web Flow editor:

In addition, when working with the flow definition, Spring IDE provides autocomplete for state identifiers:

... as well as autocomplete for beans in your web and application service layers:

A special thanks to Christian and the Spring IDE team for all their great work!