Ron Wheeler

There are a number of books on Spring and lots of free tutorials and case studies on the Internet.
Books:
Spring in Action
Spring in Practice
ProSpring
are 3 paperback that I own.
Building a REST API with Spring 4 by Eugen is a step by step recipe e-book.

Search for "Java Spring" on Youtube and Google and get ready for a lot of viewing or reading.

That is a helpful perspective and gives me some ideas about the next steps in a couple of things that I am starting to work on.

Thanks

Your workflow look correct and I am not sure why you are having unpredictable results.
Cleaning a project is an exceptional activity and should only be required occasionally.
Maven Clean is not usually required on each run but it is not a bad practice if you are seeing things that don't make sense.

Do you have m2e installed?
That gives you a good Maven environment.

Are you using a parent project for your modules that generate artifacts (jar, war)?
Dependency versions should be controlled in the dependency management section of the parent not in the pom of the modules (dependencies with no version specification there)
That way, you just change the parent and all your modules get the same version without changing the pom of each module. Less chance of error.

The Maven forum is a great place to get Maven help.

As another person trying to learn about Git and Eclipse but a long time user of Eclipse (since 2007), I would suggest that you use the Spring Tools Suite.

It is Eclipse with all of the things that you need already configured.

We got so frustrated with Eclipse since:
1) it was a PITA to upgrade. You can spend days reconstructing a stable, compatible set of plug-ins to work with a new version of Eclipse.
2) when you tried to help another person on the team, it was hard to know how they worked since they might have a different set of plug-ins.
Operations that worked on your Eclipse would not work until you installed a plug-in on their machine.
3) hard to document standard procedures even informally.

STS comes ready to rock and roll out of the box in a single download and 5 minute install. It upgrades smoothly
It has all the plug-ins that you need for Maven, Git, SVN, XML and more.

I only have to install
1)the DITA-OT plug-in and add the XML Schema definition for DITA so that I can use Eclipse to produce documentation from XML topic files that I prepare using the Eclipse XML editor and validation tools.
2) the IzPack plug-in for building installers.

Once we moved to STS a lot of the annoying stuff about Eclipse vanished and we were able to standardize our collaboration processes and could stay reasonably current with Eclipse releases.

My only quibble is that it does have a big footprint but I would rather have everything that I need and a bit more rather than be missing a tool that I don't know exists or spend hours testing plug-ins to find one that will work with what I already have installed.

Since I use it for so many things - development(Java, JavaScript, JavaFX, Junit), deployment (IzPack), SCM (SVN and now Git), bugtracking (Bugzilla and JIRA integration) documentation(DITA), proposals and studies (DITA) - I have it on all the time and the convenience is worth the RAM that it takes.

The Maven integration (m2e) is very nice and eliminates a lot of the problems that show up in the Maven forum around dependency management (Why do I have the wrong version of X.X.X in my jar?).
We never use Maven from the command line.

STS is free and the quality is very high. The Spring guys do a good job putting out a release that works each time.

A little off topic but you seem to be having grief from the plain Eclipse product and I still remember the PITA that it can be.

Give STS a try before you spend some money on a commercial product. They may be better ( I hear good things from people that I respect) but perhaps with a better version of Eclipse, you can get what you need for free.

After using SVN for a long time, I am getting pulled into Git through some open source projects that I am helping.

It seems that the Git workflow is very different.

Can you briefly describe the workflow for some of the common use cases where there is a difference between SVN and Git.

Does this meet your needs.
http://wiki.eclipse.org/JSDT

Thanks

That was the nudge that I needed. Feel a bit stupid that I did not make the relation to the INI format.

A quick google got me
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/190629/what-is-the-easiest-way-to-parse-an-ini-file-in-java

which has a link to

http://ini4j.sourceforge.net/index.html

Looks like it will move me forward to the next blockage!

Ron

Java supports Properties files and makes them easy to read.

Is there a way to easily parse a file that has properties grouped into contexts
[100]
user=Ron
city=Montreal
[101]
user=Mary
city=New York
[102]
user=Jacques
city=Paris

A bit late but just in case you have not found it yet

[email protected]

There is also a LinkedIn group Jetspeed Portals.