Running Spring Roo and GWT on STS 2.8.1

[marioja]

I have searched for instructions on how to do this and I have not found a good complete source. Here is what I have found myself. I would like people in the know to confirm what I have found so far and I also have some questions/problems:

• STS 2.8.1 comes with Roo 1.1.5 (that is well documented)
• Roo 1.1.5 supports gwt 2.3.0. Now this is a highly undocumented thing and I had to go into the GWT roo addon jar to locate a configuration.xml file with this information. It would be very useful for the roo release notes and the roo reference documentation to say this.
• STS 2.8.1 installs GWT 2.4.0 when you install the Google Eclipse Plugin from the Dashboard extension tab. This cause a problem when trying to run a roo+gwt application. I had to install the GWT 2.3.0 SDK and make it the default SDK in the Google Web Toolkit preferences and only then was I able to compile.
• When roo finishes running the gwt setup command, the "Use Google Web Toolkit" check box in settings must be unchecked then rechecked for an error about the GWT settings to disappear
• When performing the previous step, there are two SDK configured: the Maven configured (by Roo) GWT SDK and the Google Plugin for Eclipse configured GWT SDK.
• I can run the roo+gwt application in the Google Plugin Development Mode by right mouse clicking the project and selecting the run as Web application (with the blue Google icon). This will however only appear if the GWT is properly configured.

Here is all I have found so far. However, I have some questions problems

1. Was roo+gwt designed to run within the Google Plugin for Eclipse? It appears not and could it be?
2. Are there instructions to run a roo+gwt application inside the Google Plugin for Eclipse and if so where are they?
3. Is there a way to run the Roo+GWT application inside the tc Server Developer Edition v2.6? I tried adding the target/app-0.1.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT directory to the deployment assembly with little luck.
4. What is the correct resolution of the duplicate GWT libraries (maven and Google Plugin for Eclipse)? This is an issue because Eclipse complains that the GWT container is not in the exported classpath to the server yet they will be in the MAVEN container.

Can someone shed some light (and a Springsource blog entry on this topic is good but it gets out of date so quickly) and could this be added as a truly supported option? When one is using "la creme de la creme" of IDE such as STS there has to be an easier way to run a Roo+GWT application than to follow the Roo reference instructions and start a maven shell to invoke the gwt:run target.

[marioja]

After re-reading a previous thread of mine in remembered that the following could make it run on the tc Server:


After compiling I add to the deployment assembly the following entry:

Source: target/exp-0.1.0.BUILD-SNAPSHOT/applicationScaffold
Deploy Path: applicationScaffold

and I redeploy to tc Server, all seem to work with no problem. In order to type the deploy path, one has to double click on the entry in the Deploy Path column. There is no edit button capability.

[Martin Lippert]

Hi!

Glad to hear you got it working, for the feedback, and that you shared the solution here with the other forum users!!!

Cheers,
-Martin

[marioja]

Martin,

Thanks for the words of encouragement. Would it be possible however to answer the questions 1-4. Where I am coming from is a very simple and common (I should believe) use case.

I am new to Springsource ToolSuite and roo but I know Java and JavaEE well. I download the brand spanking new super duper (it really is, I don't mean it sarcastically) Springsource ToolSuite and create a simple roo project. From within STS and without a lot of research, I cannot run and test the roo program. That is fustrating a lot and I would like other people not to go through this. A forum post is a good start but it does not build the documentation and correct the quirks into the next release of STS, at which point my work around and quick fixes may no longer work. I would have thought that this should have worked out of the box and have highlighted a number of gray areas.

Thanks for the great work with STS.

[marioja]

After continuing to research this topic, I discovered one location that describes what needs to be done in a sort of complete way. Of all the places, I found it on the Google Web Toolkit documentation pages. If you go to the Google Web Toolkit web page for the GWT 2.4, in the left navigation you will see a heading "Getting started" and under the heading you will see "SpringSource Tools". Currently, this page resides here. However, there are two validation library in the target sub folder that must be added to the build path for this to work. However, I still think there should be a STS supported and documented way of doing this and have my questions answered.

[marioja]

More research revealed the following (which addresses the fourth questions):

When the gwt setup roo command is invoked and all the building and background processing is done, I notice that maven created a specific SDK definition of GWT 2.3.0 based on the maven repository files. I say based because the file structure of a GWT SDK the file structure of the maven repository are totally different. With this maven created abstraction (which is not in any .settings project file I could find) set as the current GWT sdk, one need not download or create a workspace specific GWT SDK as I had indicated above. Can people in the know confirm that my findings are accurate?