Feb 03
FYI: Spring IDE 2.0.2 is broken on Eclipse 3.3/Java 6
I was banging my head against the wall due to this problem. Apparently there is an issue with Spring IDE 2.0.2 running on a Java 6 platform - simply put, it doesn’t work. There’s a JIRA filed on this, along with some discussion [#1], [#2]in the Spring forums. I reverted to manually installing Spring IDE 2.0.1 from the update site (unzip, then use eclipse -clean), and it worked again.
This was on a brand new Eclipse 3.3 install with no prior trace of the Spring IDE plugin 
Hopefully this helps someone. The error that I saw upon startup of Eclipse was:
java.lang.NoClassDefFoundError: Could not initialize class org.springframework.core.CollectionFactory at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.<init>(DefaultSingletonBeanRegistry.java:86) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.FactoryBeanRegistrySupport.<init>(FactoryBeanRegistrySupport.java:40) at org.springframework.beans.factory.support.AbstractBeanFactory.<init>(AbstractBeanFactory.java:146) at org.springframework.ide.eclipse.beans.core.DefaultBeanDefinitionRegistry.<init>(DefaultBeanDefinitionRegistry.java:72) at org.springframework.ide.eclipse.beans.core.internal.model.BeansConfig.readConfig(BeansConfig.java:707) [snip]
February 3rd, 2008 at 3:08 pm
Strange … I’m using Spring IDE 2.0.2 on eclise 3.3.1.1 + Sun JDK 6u3 in a daily basis … Never ever got this exception.
Lucky ?
February 3rd, 2008 at 7:05 pm
I guess so - I tried Christian’s suggestion in the thread of installing the OSGi backport, but no luck. I didn’t really want to waste a whole lot of time fiddling with it, so I jumped back to 2.0.1 and got on with things.
Perhaps I’ll invest the time in trying again, or jumping ahead to 2.0.3 off the source tree…
Thanks for your feedback!