I think most gwt developer who watched the demo of Spring Roo in Google IO video would be interested in giving "the expense-tracking GWT project under 200 keystrokes" a try. However, that 200 keystrokes took me almost a day to put into debug mode. (if you also got stuck and would like too know how to get through, give me a shout)
Anyhow, I got it running. But there are so many drawbacks that I encounter. Maybe there are some other way round, but there are virtually no documentations. Isn't spring roo supposed to accelerate code formation? But it seems that it's trying to waste as much time as they can to slow you down. I have to admit that I don't know much about spring / roo / maven (nor i'm a java expert). So please point it out if I made the wrong claims. 1. Roo generated everything into UIBinder. i think why most people invest their time into GWT because it's Java. We are more familiar with Swing type of development rather than HTML. And Uibinder just turns me off immediately. I bought a license of GWT Designer before Google bought the company. I believe this acquisition implies that GWT will stick onto Swing type of UI development. But on Roo project, GWT Designer is rendered totally useless and what you can see are window internal errors. 2. I think others have also complained that whenever you made changes to the domain objects, all your custom changes on the UI will be lost. Maybe there are some other ways to get around with it, but there is no documentation telling me how to do it!! 3. In Ruby On Rails, all the codes you see after scaffolding or raking are just what you need to see. But Roo will generate a hell lot of codes which you don't know where you should touch and where you shouldn't. I spent hours watching videos from Google IO trying to understand what does all those new factories / activities / renderer mean. But sorry, i just can't follow all those fancy flowchart. But why don't you put them into some documentation so that I can follow them at my own pace? 4. Seems that the code generator or gwt plugins on STS are still having some bugs. Some of the viewbinder doesn't have the corresponding ui.xml generated. (maybe there are omitted for good reasons). And @UIField are shown missing even they are actually there. I think another important reasons of choosing GWT instead of other framework is because of the error detection mechanism. You can root out most silly errors with the IDE because all errors are underlined in red. Now you got those red lines in almost all files in the scaffold.generated source folder. So you just turn a blind eye to those? 5. Maybe it's just me. Annotation is just not my cup of tea. I don't know how many of them, their usages or even how to spell them. And there are just too many of them with uibinder and roo. Those scaffolding and data binding in 2.1. looks intriguing. , but gonna go back to do some real work with GWT 2.0. I just hope the release of 2.1 will turn out to be much better documented. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google Web Toolkit" group. To post to this group, send email to google-web-tool...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to google-web-toolkit+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-web-toolkit?hl=en.