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 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.
