Installing roo in 5 minutes

Question

I just wanted to spend half an hour to try out spring roo - but failed miserably.

The Spring roo project page on spring.io simply tells to add a maven dependency. But I'm not aware of any public maven repository providing it

The Project page on github includes all the sources, but the readme starts with

These instructions are aimed at experienced developers looking to develop Spring Roo itself. If you are new to Spring Roo [..] we recommend that you visit the Spring Roo home page and download an official release: http://www.springsource.org/roo

Needless to say, this url points back to the github page..

Is there any pain-free way of installing spring roo? (let's assume Windows 7, JDK 1.7)

I know that in the time of writing this I could have installed it from source - but I think a rapid prototyping framework should do better.

Answer 1

Adding the jar to your project is not enough, because you need the Roo shell/console to run while you are developing your project.

Its quite simple using the Spring IDE/Roo plugin. You can download the Spring Source Tool Suite or add the update site (same link at the bottom) to your Eclipse version (I did not test the update site so far).

In your IDE click File -> New -> Spring Roo Project. Be sure to set the appropriate top level package here, i.e. com.yourdomain.projectname (thats where roo will create its artifacts; like a home directory in Linux it can be abbreviated by typing ~ in the roo console). Select "war" as the packaging provider.

Unfortunately the project might not get the "Dynamic web project" facade and not all maven related source folders might have been created (seems to be a bug?). In that case right click the project name -> preferences -> Project Facets -> Dynamic Web Project 3.0. Be sure to click the "Further conf..." link at the bottom and insert 'src/main/webapp' as the content directory.

After that right click your project again -> Spring Tools -> Open Roo shell. And wait for the console to load. Then you can finally start with the "quick" start tutorial at line four, typing in 'hint' in the console. Also try crtl+space for content completion.