Spring Roo & 2.1 M3, not recommended if you haven't tried.

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.

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