Spring Roo – Second Look

Alright, I have been using Spring Roo for last month and I thought I have much better understanding of the internals of Spring ROO. As I use it more, I am less excited about it. I sincerely think that the product is in a very nascent state and it has quite a few annoyances to be fixed, before it can be used as a real productivity booster.

My #1 gripe would be that the views getting overwritten, every time the STS workspace is initialized. I had to redo the same set of changes in the view JSPs, at least 3 times so far! This is just pain beyond description, as it resets my progress. I guess I can turn off automatic scaffolding for this view by specifying the annotation @automaticallyMaintainView=false. But, this will turn off scaffolding completely

My second gripe would be with the compilation errors in the generated Aspects. The irony is, during development, when the embedded Tomcat in Maven is used, the application runs all fine (obviously, as the tests are not compiled). So, the code looks all perfect, only to realize that the generated tests do not compile! The cryptic abstracted error messaging does not help either. I ended up in wild chase to figure out the root cause, only to waste my valuable time!

I still think it is a good idea and I am looking forward to a more mature product in the near future!

~ by kasigaadu on January 19, 2010.