Cannot proceed with Spring Roo: Advaned MVC Problems

Question

I was scheduled to begin work on a new project and decided to make my life easier by adopting a new technology that I had no experience with: Spring!

Specifically Spring Roo, and therein lies my problem.

Spring Roo does so much auto-magical stuff that I really do not know how to proceed. As this runs the risk of turning into a rant, let me be more specific and then follow it up with my question:

Spring works great for setting up my classes and persisting them with Hibernate and all that. The main problem I am having is in trying to scaffold my project.

I am working on a project that manages a few "set" references with many-to-many and many-to-one relationships. This immediately will have problem with the scaffolding application.

Trying to add Google Web Toolkit via 'gwt setup' kills the application immediately. Trying to load in Tomcat server becomes impossible and there is no way to undo the process (as far as I know). Now what? I have to restart my project from the original commands and reapply my changes as far as I can tell.

With this being said it seems to me that the best process is to use ROO to generate my project artifacts and then create my own View/Controller setup. Even here I am having problems though, because the tiles configuration seems so obscured from how it works. I am having a hard time figuring out how to take a custom JSP that can process some of these complex many-to-one relationships (AJAX enabled) and add it to my web front.

Are there any guides for this?

FYI: in the existing Roo Generated MVC I tried

• Copying over my JSP
• Creating a Form Backing Objects that wraps the different entity types
• Modifying the views.xml file in the folder to recognize the page

One this was accomplished, though, I have been unsure how to proceed. How do I access my JSP? Manually typing the URL as it is defined in views.xml does not work.

Should I think about abandoning Roo altogether and starting a Spring project from scratch?

Answer 1

Bet way to learn Spring Roo

• read documentation (Spring Roo, enter link description here)
• experiment with Roo and watch console output. See files that change, what changes if you add new controller etc.
• read and discuss matters in SpringSource forum
• follow spring-roo tag in SO

Using Spring Roo for scaffolding

• user version control system or backup project. If result does not satisfies you - rollback changes.
• Eclipse or SpringSource Tool suite have have hiccups (1, 2). Be aware of them. Use mvn eclipse:clean eclipse:eclipse and re-import project if necessarily.
• know the difference between MVC architectural pattern, Web MVC framework and GWT scaffold application.
• know limitations and behaviour of scaffolding (ITDs: GWT Style, Expected GWT Add-On Behaviour, JSP Views)
• know how Validation, Data Binding, and Type Conversion works, to use effetely in your views
• investigate request pipeline (Adding a custom page in spring roo, Adding new Activity in GWT scaffolded app)