2010 March 13
First Impressions of Spring Roo
Java programmers with Django envy can be very happy with Spring Roo. Roo leverages aspect-oriented programming to provide a new way of programming Java applications where the programmer mainly concerns himself with various aspects like entities, controllers. Roo then takes care of generating views, setting up the JPA functionality among others. The great thing is that it is a development time dependency, and so has no runtime overhead. Round tripping is also supported, where Roo adapts to changes made to the source code by the user. Currently it seems it is heavily geared toward Spring technologies out of the box. But it supposedly has a good add-on model by which extensions are being added.
Interesting features
- Addresses almost all aspects of a project including unit testing, integration testing
- Generates an automatic REST controller for an entity, with flexible options for fine-tuning
- As opposed to Grails which operates at runtime, Roo is a dev-time help, so no impact on application performance
- It is basically 'advanced scripting on top of Spring and Maven'