What can ROO do to stand out and actually be the goto option for Java projects

Hey Guys,
I would like to thank the ROO team for thinking about developer productivity and taking a step towards automating scaffolding.

I have recently been evaluating Play framework for Java and Roo for a personal project and unfortunately even though Roo makes scaffolding easy, Play came out much more developer friendly and INTUITIVE for a start-up kind of an application. I did the initial scaffolding after deciding to give Roo a try and ended up using Play because Roo was consuming more time than i would expect to devote to get things going.

That being said ROO has Spring backing and i love what Spring provided to the java community so i would like to see ROO succeed and prove a viable alternative in future iterations. Here are few suggestions which I hope ROO team can look at and provide answers to for the greater benefit of adopters.

1) Web 2.0 App: Provide easy jquery integration along with samples of customizing the tiles and use standard 960 grid instead of an 800px grid. The admin app generated looks very ugly on a big monitor and fluid theme or a 960 theme (TWITTER BOOTSTRAP is very helpful) might help. It is hard to sell using DIJIT and DOJO in 2012 or not providing an easy way to swap out the toolkit (No offence to dojo folks). The whole stack of apache tiles, dojo, css is like living in 2001 and i absolutely loathed this.

2) Generate ADMIN or CRUD later like Play does (IF YOUR APP NEEDS IT) via a command. Keeping this in mind modify the sample and add examples like Play's blog which are usable out of the box (MANY FOLKS are using the blog app as it is on production blogs). This inspires more confidence in someone who just wants to build an app over a weekend and this is where Rails and Play make it so much better. This will also be helpful to folks who just want to use the scaffolding aspect of generating a controller and view and probably adding it in respective xml files which is the most annoying, time consuming, irritating, error prone and un-debuggable aspect of spring.

3) LESS/SASS integration: This will help in customizing and probably creating a theme framework down the line.

4) Spring security add on with oauth providers (Google, Facebook, twitter etc.). Play modules like securesocial make it as simple as adding a command and also provide built in views to handle it.

5) Customization of admin views, play makes it so simple to override and customize default admin CRUD pages and the documentation helps.

I am hoping roo team takes this as a constructive suggestions rather than criticism and hopefully Roo will gain more adoption with time.

@retrofit,

Very-very interesting... Could you please provide link(s) where I could review deployed web applications based on Play for Java.


Thank you in advance.
jD

"Even the stack traces are stripped down and optimized to make it easier to solve problems. "

Now, why Spring Framework doesn't have this by default is really beyond me.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by retrofit

2) Generate ADMIN or CRUD later like Play does (IF YOUR APP NEEDS IT) via a command.

3) LESS/SASS integration: This will help in customizing and probably creating a theme framework down the line.

4) Spring security add on with oauth providers (Google, Facebook, twitter etc.). Play modules like securesocial make it as simple as adding a command and also provide built in views to handle it.

5) Customization of admin views, play makes it so simple to override and customize default admin CRUD pages and the documentation helps.

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Yes, thank you!

Is the 3rd party GWT support any good? That's kind of scary.

Do you mean in Play or in Spring Roo?

In Play. The GWT module is 3rd party. Roo has native GWT support.

Guys,

Definitely efficient and productive web development tools are very important...
The final product -which is the deployed web app- should be included as well.

Actual deployed Play web app would help to see how good really is.

Where is the list?

Thank you
jD

playapps.net is built on play. There is a page which lists many sites using it. The creators themselves have posted how they have built many banking and financial apps using play as part of their projects with zenexity. you can also browse their forums where devs normally post their apps from time to time.

http://www.playframework.org/community/testimonials

if you want to see and learn follow their tutorial (yabe).

There is another thread on stackoverflow which talks about real world production experiences:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2...on-experiences

You can also look at the following blog (nesbot.com). The source has been posted by the blog author here (https://github.com/briannesbitt/nesbot.com).

Given the age of Play framework it has matured really fast and play 2.0 is around the corner with async http, anorm, and many other awesome features.

I have been a J2EE developer/architect for 12 years and have never come out so impressed with a framework.

It will be java developers wet dream if ROO is another robust alternative in the rapid agile programming world.

Some cool Play sites. I created a packing list for my trips. Main thing I noticed is that all the testimonial sites had that Web 2.0 fresh look that I have been trying to get from my Roo project, but have troubles customizing the Roo pages. I just don't like in Play that all the classes extend framework specific classes. And I saw a lot of similarities with Grails in Play.

I agree, that in order for Roo to really stand out and be used in production, we need that same sort of functionality we get from Grails and Play. I know the Roo team can do it, they are brilliant people.

Mark