Singing some Greenhouse Praise!

[dmfrey]

I am really digging all the new functionality Spring 3.1 is gonna bring us. I know it is not ready for general release as of yet but here is something to think about...

The Greenhouse application is, IMO, more than just a way to highlight the Spring 3.1 features. The application is well thought out, designed and implemented. I have been using Spring for a long time and after reviewing this application, I am picking up new tricks and better ways to organize my applications. It should become the reference Spring application so that developers new to Spring, as well as seasoned programers, can review it and use it to help drive there design.

That being said, the application is very feature rich. There is a considerable amount of functionality that can be reused across applications, especially where the social aspects are concerned. Is there any plan to incorporate Greenhouse with something like Roo where you stub out an application with, but not limited to, the following features:
- User Account Management
- Social Login (login with facebook, twitter, etc.)
- Social Integration (posting to facebook, twitter, etc.)
- OAuth Signin (for authentication applications on android, iphone, etc.)

I am sure there is currently other functionality that is more general purpose and would be beneficial as well. However, after reviewing the code, there was a considerable amount of work that went into implementing just the features listed above.

I am currently writing an application that requires the above functionality and am going to use Greenhouse as a model to implement these features, especially for integrating with mobile platforms.

It would be great if, at some point, Greenhouse can be integrated with Roo as some type of template application stub that generates a base application with the above functionality.

Thanks for all this great work! I am really looking forward to Spring 3.1.

[Keith Donald]

Glad you're finding Greenhouse useful! We've worked hard to make it a quality reference for the latest Spring has to offer. This work will continue.

If you've been following the app, you've noticed we've continued to extract Greenhouse functionality that is general-purpose into our Spring libraries/frameworks. For example, all the Social Connect and Sign-In support is handled by the Spring Social project now, where before it was part of Greenhouse. In that way, we've used Greenhouse as a driver for framework features. This process will continue. For example, we expect to add a spring-social-invite module from the invitation work that has been started in Greenhouse. We also expect we'll generalize the "Social User" account model and "Develop" module of Greenhouse in a future release of Spring Social.

I expect Roo will also add support for Spring Social in a future version. I would definitely ping the Roo team and vote for Spring Social support. If there is not an existing JIRA issue to vote on, create one at http://jira.springsource.org/browse/ROO. In general, the Roo team prioritizes their work based on how much community demand (votes) there are for a specific feature. I also expect Roo will use Greenhouse as a reference as it continues to advance and support the latest advances in the Spring programming model. In particular, there is a great opportunity to simplify Spring apps with Spring 3.1 and the use of Java configuration. I expect Roo will standardize on this model once Spring Framework 3.1 is generally available, and also encourage you to recommend that to them as well (by creating and voting on Roo issues).

Hope this helps!

Keith