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web-applicationsgwtspring-roo

Roo + GWT - good for developing?


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.


Solution

  • 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.