How does SpringFramework works? Can I trust it?

[BlessedGeek]

OK, I tried the Pizza example.

It took me two hours to figure out how to work to get the web app up and running. And I'm all excited.

TWO HOURS!!! versus what would have taken me a week or may be two. And if I had to do it in MVC with the style and professionalism, may be two months. Look at all the code that's generated for me. How does it work? Anybody care to explain all the magic behind that, in conceptual blocks?

But I am having my doubts. Can I really trust Spring roo? These are the problems:

1. http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=93518. My kludge = just make a copy of STS in my home directory. Very bad kludge for Spring to have me to that.
2. Roo automagically generated all the maven dependencies but ... it forgot to include javax.servlet.api:jsp-api:2.1. Thanks to my lucky stars that I could recognise a jsp api member to immediately recognise that roo did not include jsp-api.jar - giving myself a pat on my back.
3. There was a jsf reference to spring:message code="application_name" but there was no entry for "application_name" in message.properties file. I was scratching my head and toe nails what the jetty and tomcat exception dump was about until I inserted the entry

   application_name=Pizzarama

   into message.properties file.
4. The instructions says "just drag the project into the server instance" at the the servers tab. I did that again and again, nothing happened and I could not associate the Pizza app to the Spring tc server. I decided to run it from mvn as the advised alternative

If I start developing a rather complex app, will I encounter more problems and will it be as easy as the fix I just delivered myself in the simple Pizza example. I mean, roo forgot to include jsp-api.jar. How much more automagication would it forget to include?

Especially the question lingers - do I have to get my feet up on aspectJ when I am still attempting my best at Guice? How much expertise in aspectj would I need to have?

Next I am moving on to roo with GWT (and GAE!). Oh yes, I hate handcrafting the DAO and then syncing them with GWT fields. Will Roo generate the GWT fields (and all the controllers too?!) for me so that all I need to design is the model. That would be great. I am great at designing. That would be like outsourcing all the coding of a project to my PC (instead of to an offshore country).

Really, roo can do all this for me? That'd be cheating. Somebody tell me the good news that it's "yes".

And one last question, if roo is that good, how come this forum is still running on PHP?

[Rod Johnson]

A few quick answers:

- You don't need to use AspectJ explicitly to use Roo. There is no need to edit Roo-maintained aspects.
- Re "cheating": Yes, Roo truly transforms Java productivity. Yet you have the full power of Spring underneath and aren't constrained from writing any custom code.
- Re "trust": Roo helps you create applications built on Spring, which is by far the commonest choice among Java frameworks. Plenty of proof points.
- Good question re forums. We have always taken the practical view that our community wanted us to focus our R&D effort on developing Spring and the other projects/products they use, rather than redevelop perfectly usable applications for ideological reasons. Furthermore, Roo did not exist when the forum choice was made.

HTH