I too have recently been playing around with GWT and Spring Roo over the past few days to see what all the hype was about during Google IO. So far, my assessment of it has been similar to yours Amir. It's great if all you need is a simple UI for a database editor but anything else that requires more customisation, you're probably better off hand coding it and doing your own plumbing.
I've never used the Spring Framework so perhaps if you have some experience using it, then that might make using GWT easier for you. Currently the lack of documentation coupled with having to manually read the code to figure out what's going on has proven to be too much of a time investment for what its worth. Until a better tutorial than the tech demo at Google IO is made, I'll probably stick to doing things the old but familiar way. On Nov 4, 8:26 am, Amir Kashani <[email protected]> wrote: > I've been playing with Roo & GWT for a couple of days now, which > certainly doesn't make me an expert, but I'd like to share my > experience and see how it compares with others. > > The application that I'm trying to create has about 8 entities that > require a CRUD like interface. The rest of the application requires a > more specific (non-CRUD) UI. My hope was that Roo would help generate > the CRUD portions, just allowing for some basic customizations, and > let me handle the rest. So far, I seem to be fighting it more than > it's helped. Some examples: > > - You can't modify the generated ui.xml files -- Roo will simply > clobber them as soon as it makes the next change for that entity. For > example, I don't want to list the ID field in the list view, but I > don't see a way to remove it. There's a JIRA open about this, that was > deferred to post 1.1.0 (ROO-937). > > - New dynamic finders don't seem to be added to the respective Request > interface. Further, and this may be a Roo thing, they return > TypedQuery rather than a List or the entity, which I don't imagine the > RequestFactory framework can handle. There's another JIRA than covers > this, I believe (ROO-1595) > > - Adding custom finders doesn't work, because again, Roo will clobber > the Request interface. I tried removing the @RooGwtMirroredFrom > annotation from the Request, but Roo just readied it for me. Probably > under the previous JIRA. > > Lastly, the documentation is atrocious. The Roo reference guide only > mentions GWT in its appendix of commands, and other guides only go as > far as a simple "gwt setup". There's no mention of the expectations, > limitations, guide to customization, or anything else. I've seen > several, yet unanswered posts on the Roo forum about customization, so > I imagine I'm not alone here. > > I've been a very loyal GWT user since 1.3, and I'm very pleased with > the ongoing progress, including the gamut of features introduced in > 2.1, so I hope nobody takes this as GWT bashing. However, unless I'm > really missing something, the implementation of Roo+GWT falls far > short of the hype it's received since I/O. In the current form, it > makes for a very impressive demo: type a few commands and a full > functioning database editor pops out. But as soon as you try to do > anything outside of what's generated, it's very hard, if not > impossible. > > So, it's only been a few days since final release, but what do other > people think? Is anyone having better luck? > > Thanks. > > - Amir -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.
