If you have ever written a piece of software, then you know there is a lot of work that goes into writing code. Especially if you consider that most of the programs you write will contain a significant amount of boilerplate code. That is code that is necessary, to do a particular task like connecting to a database or implementing a framework like MVC. Now you could create templates or copy and paste your boilerplate code from one file to another. But that can be time-consuming and generally involves A LOT of duplication of effort. Instead, why not consider using Spring Roo to generate all that boilerplate code for you. That way you can focus more on coding the application, than setup and boilerplate.
An Introduction To Spring Roo
Spring Roo is an easy-to-use development tool for quickly building web applications in the Java programming language, which can be used as a standalone application or as an Eclipse or STS plugin. Roo allows you to produce high-quality, high-performance, lock-in-free enterprise applications in just minutes. Now a lot of developers may shy away from Spring Roo because it is a code generator. However, unlike other generation tools, Spring Roo gives the developer full control over their software. Because Roo uses annotations and scaffolding files to manage the code it generates. Leaving its generated files clean and easy to manipulate and maintain. However, what if you decide you don’t want to use Spring Roo after your project is created or you’re just done using Roo? No problem. All you need to do to remove it is run the cleanup command and all the Roo annotations and scaffolding disappear keeping the code clean.
We will be covering the following topics:
- A Brief Introduction to Spring
- What is Spring Roo
- Setting up our Development Environment
- Building a Product Catalog CRUD MVC application
This series comes from our mentoring/mastermind classes. These classes are virtual meetings that focus on how to improve our technical skills and build our businesses. The goals of each member vary. However, this diversity makes for great discussions and a ton of educational value every time we meet. We hope you enjoy viewing this series as much as we enjoy creating it. As always, this may not be all new to you, but we hope it helps you be a better developer.