Alternative usage of Spring Roo

is Spring Roo supposed to be only a tool for rapid development of web applications, thanks to all that scaffolding, source code generation and similar stuff, such as grails for groovy.

Or can it be utilized as a source code generator / osgi platform for building enterprise applications ? What I mean is, that there are source code generators, that generate only domain model and light DAO layer based on metadata definition when starting a new project and you have to stick to the objective - create a web app. But there are also generators, that generate the entire DAO and service layer - fantastic for iterative dev process of bigger apps - and you are not restricted otherwise, you are just using it to build you enterprise app step by step. With this you can really build a huge enterprise applications / platforms that will be maintainable 开发者_运维问答for a very long time.

Also the OSGI model could be employed in a way, that you might develop a core portal application for instance, with a package of social office addons that you may plug in, etc. etc.

My point is, that Java development needs to be "Rubyfied". I mean Ruby on Rails environment where you have everything unified and standardized. A platform that could rule the java world some time :-)

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Since Thomas and @jhericks trashed Spring Roo I'm going to say I actually like it mainly because its not a framework. Roo also (now) support multi-maven modules.

To answer your question: Spring Roo is not framework. It is code generation. So yeah it is a code generation platform not only for web apps but any Java app.

There are couple of reasons why some people don't like Roo:

• It uses AspectJ
• It uses Spring
• It does Code Generation

After building several applications with Spring Roo I can say its greatest value is its ORM generating abilities and its DataOnDemand test generation. Other than that Spring Roo is really just Spring *.

Frameworks like Play and Ruby on Rails are just not really the "Java Way". That is most Java (Web) Apps I see are combination of libraries and not a giant framework.

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As far as I experienced, Spring Roo is meant to be a RAD/bootstrapping tool for web applications. There are some major features missing and not on the roadmap that would make it truly useful in an enterprise application context. An example being multi-module Maven support.

This rather polemic article and its follow ups summarize quite well how I feel about Roo and similar projects like Seam Forge.

If you are looking for something RoR-like for Java check out the Play Framework that currently seems to gain momentum.