Spring Roo

What do you like best?

It generates lots of boilerplate, test cases, service classes, by a couple of commands. It ends up saving lots of time when you need rapid development. I was primarily using spring roo 1.3.2 which is quite old. We used it for lots of hackathons and small-2 POC's. Just one suggestion for the team, make sure the number of tutorials are high for spring roo. I personally as well as some team members have faces issues whose solutions are not available on the internet at all.

What do you dislike?

I have faced a couple of debugging issues. Sometimes fixing failing test cases was difficult to solve. In the long run, you will run into hanging consoles, AspectJ issues, Auto-generated test cases are a mess :( I believe we should generate a normal spring boot project as soon as we are done with the implementation of your idea and 2-3 months in production. It was difficult for new folks as well because spring boot is quite popular and available in terms of tutorials. Initially, the motivation is also quite less because not everyone uses it in the spring world.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Spring boot is very fast in terms of development. Together with Lombok, it's even faster to develop, Check do you really need a command line code generator. Use spring roo when you need to build something completely new.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are using it to power a couple of microservices for an online learning product. It's a very good tool to build experimental projects/POC's as it saves lots of time.

Benefits:

1. Auto-generation of Services, Models, test cases, etc.