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I've been working on GWT projects for a few months now and I decided to give a try to this Spring Roo thing. I noticed that to go from 0 to the same results as with Roo it can take very long. My first thought was: "this is great"!

But once you've setup a couple of persistent entities and Roo generates your scaffolding for GWT and you have some very basic layout but a huge amount of code. Then what? You stop using Roo and go on by hand? The UI is nice but is very basic.

I don't want to modify things by hand since I don't want to mess up Roo generation. So I just remove all Roo stuff and I fall to the "slow" mode again.

  • Has anyone created a relatively complex application with Spring Roo + GWT?

  • I'm not very familiar with Spring so it might get ugly (used to GWT + GXT + DataNucleus + Guice/Gin + Gilead). Do you recommend staying away from Roo in such a case?

From my point of view, Roo is good for generating the domain layer boilerplate since this is very tedious, but that's it.

Cœur
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code-gijoe
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2 Answers2

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From my experience, Roo is very useful for quick prototyping and proof of concept.

It's also useful to maintain the data model in sync with JPA/DAO layer.

But indeed, for more complex business requirements at service level and UI design, you'll have to switch to plain old manual coding.

Frederic Conrotte
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  • So, is this the "official" use-case? Quick prototyping or, when you want to use it on real projects, let it generate the scaffolding once and then go from there (i.e. hack the autogenerated code and never run roo again)? – Thilo Dec 12 '10 at 05:18
  • Well it seems Roo is one solution to understand the "best practices" but then you keep going by hand... I found this other post which is quite interesting: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4243454/to-roo-or-not-to-roo – code-gijoe Dec 13 '10 at 02:07
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in my experience. roo + gwt gets you extremly long build cycles (when you have enough entities, haven't tried it with springMVC maybe it's slow too). the aspectj build is somehow causing it. so to break it down. i wouldn't do it again. if you don't believe me create a sample project with 100 entities with 5 fields each. Then open the AJDT-console and clean the project ... and have a coffee break or something ;-)

cproinger
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