I’ll start by saying that I admire what the Spring guys are aiming with Spring Roo. I really hope that this effort will be successful.
The promise is great; up and running enterprise Java applications in minutes, however, after being burnt in the past, most developers still would like to keep sense of control over their code base.
After watching the Google I/O keynote, where it was clear the Spring and GWT guys are working together, I wanted to spend 60 minutes on Roo and see how it goes.
So, I went into the Roo website and followed the command line instructions. Documentation is great and also the command line behaves very well. Didn’t dive yet into the auto-generated code, but I have a good feeling that the guys at SpringSource knows what they are doing.
after 5 minutes, the user experience is just great. And than came the maven piece…
I finished creating the first project as described here, and followed the instruction:
roo> perform tests
And than waited for 16 minutes and 3 seconds while seeing screens like this one:
I understand it’s not Roo, but maven behind the scenes, and that it was the first time maven was running on my laptop, hence the time it takes. However, I do expect to see much clearer messages about what’s going on, and why it takes so long…