When I use Spring Roo tutorials, they create a LHS menu and a RHS content panel.
"LHS menu - RHS Content" is an industry standard no frills interface. I have no idea how to create more complex and diversified UI patterns and templates?
There are other industry standard patterns and templates:
LHS content - RHS menu.
Menu at top of content panel
LHS page hierarchy tree - RHS content panel
RHS page hierarchy tree - LHS content panel
I have been googling high and low on how to specify in Spring Roo to produce one of the alternative UI templates/patterns, but could not find any.
OK, e.g. we want to have an industry standard complex UI pattern where the page has:
Top menu (login/logout | Currently logged in User | Engineering Analysis | Product Status | Reports | Help ).
Content panel has a variable number of tabs, depending on the current state of information being chosen by user.
In some states of the page, there may be no LHS menu, but simply cell table. Some states will have a LHS hierarchy tree.
And how do I use Roo to create a page like, e.g. , hmmm .... like this page , like this StackOverflow page? How do I specify field type Rich Editor?
Is Roo capable of the above postulated features? How or Why not?
"Industry standard UI patterns" means in standard industry practice, there are diverse UI patterns. But Roo tutorials could only produce one of the myriad patterns and which is the simplest worn-out stale out-dated pattern. For Roo to be a flexible industry tool, it has to be able to allow a developer/programmer to configure it to produce most of what I call "industry standard postulated UI patterns".
So the additional question is - Is Roo a "flexible industry tool" or is it trivially for us to toy around but not for serious industrial deployment? Where can I find reading materials to help me use Roo for serious industry UI pattern construction.
Roo uses Spring MVC to create the view, in particular it uses Tiles to create the layout.
Find the bean for resolving Tiles views in the Spring web application context file (xml) and you can see how it uses a layouts.xml to build the 2 templates, one for the common pages and the other for the exceptions.
I don't have my computer right now, so I can't give you the actual names, but you can change this structure easily.
Regarding the "flexible" term, I presume they mean that you can create your own add-on to generate the views. For instance, you can take a look to the Vaadin Roo add-on.