Spring roo Vs (Wicket and Spring)

Question

Spring roo is new framework and I found it very interesting. I have been working on web application for last 3-4 years and Always found JSPs are hard to maintain across teams if everyone is not disciplined enough about separation of markup and serverside logic. I have used JackBe/BackBase in last projects and I enjoyed xml templates working as views. This was much better than JSPs. But I couldnt automate webtests through selenium for backbase.

I would be surely using Spring MVC (-view), Hibernate on the backend. I found Wicket as good alternative. Have you used wicket along with Spring and what was your experience?

Answer 1

First, Spring Roo is a code generator tool (similar to Grails commands system):

_{(source: springsource.com)}

Second, Spring Roo applications currently use Spring Web Flow for the view and Spring for the glue.

So, while you can compare (Spring Web Flow + Spring) and (Wicket + Spring), the later combo doesn't offer anything comparable to Roo out of the box (maybe AppFuse or AppFuse Light but you didn't mention them and they are third-party projects).

In other words, I don't think that "Spring Roo vs (Wicket and Spring)" makes sense.

Answer 2

Our current project uses Spring and Wicket, we have always used Spring but switched to Wicket a year ago. Few advices:

• Get the "Wicket in Action" book.
• The user mailing list is very helpful.
• Make sure you understand Wicket's programming model especially the session serialization related stuff (the book does not help enough in this area IMHO).
• Wicket is good at building stateful pages, it requires more work to build stateless pages.
• There are some good UI widgets available like inmethod DataGrid.
• It's easy to inject your Spring beans in your pages or components.

Spring Roo is still in beta (1.0 M2), so it may be a little early. We also considered Tapestry 5 but we thought it was a bit young a year ago.

Answer 3

Spring Roo 1.0.0 (GA) has now been released, complete with around 100 pages of documentation.

If you're wondering about what Roo is and why use it, I recommend you take a read of the introductory chapter of the reference guide. It covers this and more.

@Antony, GWT support is a major priority for Roo and something I am currently working on. Expect to see some interesting integration in the very near future.

Answer 4

I was at the SpringOne conference in Amsterdam earlier this year when they announced Roo. My impression (and that of my colleague who was there) was that Roo was good if you were generating a web-based CRUD application every few weeks - they pitched it as the pure Java version of Grails (which is RoR for Java).

Didn't look interesting for anyone else - but that's just an opinion.