Preface

In the summer of 2009, I learned from Ben Alex about a new technology called Spring Roo. This project, based on a command-line shell, promised to bring the agility of other rapid development frameworks, such as Grails and Ruby on Rails, to the native Java and Spring platform. Using a shell instead of writing code seemed like a loss of control, but after downloading and experimenting with the tool, I started to realize the potential of this project. As you’ll see in the book, the biggest challenge faced by Spring developers—beyond writing business logic—is how to build an application architecture and configure various application features (for example, installing JMS, email, Spring MVC, JPA, NoSQL databases, and other frameworks). Roo appeared to crack that problem and provide an elegant solution.

With Spring Roo, you issue simple commands, such as jpa setup, web mvc setup, entity jpa, field, service, and repository. Configuration tasks that normally take hours or days are performed instantly. I could see that this was going to be a useful tool for the everyday Spring developer. Since my Chariot training colleague and longtime friend Gordon Dickens was also interested in Roo, we decided to approach Manning about writing a book. Unlike so many other times in my life, I was able to position myself at just the right time to make the pitch. Manning accepted, and you are reading the result.