Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook Review

This review is about Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook by Ashish Sarin from Packt Publishing. Before I get into details lets me first tell you what is Spring Roo in case you don’t know.

Note : I am author of Spring Roo series on IBM DeveloperWorks.

What is Spring Roo?

Spring Roo is a lightweight productivity tool for Java™ technology that makes it fast and easy to develop Spring-based applications. Applications created using Spring Roo follow Spring best practices and are based on standards such as JPA, Bean Validation (JSR-303), and Dependency Injection (JSR-330). Roo offers a usable, context-aware, tab-completing shell for building applications. Spring Roo is extensible and allows add-ons, enhancing its capability.

Book Details

1. 7 chapters covered in 460 pages. Each chapter has some recipes and each recipe is divide into four parts — Getting Started, How to do it, How it works, and there’s more. So each recipe give you all the details required from getting started to details related to how it works. I liked this approach.
2. Book costs $44.99 http://www.packtpub.com/spring-roo-1-1-cookbook/book
3. This book covers Spring Roo in detail.

Pros

1. Recipes represents solution to real world problems. This book covered how to define composite keys, talked about how you can use JNDI datasource, how you can create application which has to interact with multiple databases etc. These are the problems you will face in real world and this book tries to answer them.
2. The two chapters I liked the most are chapter 3 and 4 which covered Advanced JPA and Spring MVC web applications. Chapter 3 covered in detail how you can create many-to-one, one-to-many relations, create mapped super class etc. Chapter 4 gives you all detail you need to create Spring MVC application and customize them according to your requirement.
3. This book from the start talks how different features are provided by Spring Roo through Add-ons. I think it is very important to share Spring Roo add-on architecture from the start as this tells you that you can extend Spring Roo by writing your own add-ons.
4. The book not only covers Spring Roo but also provides good introduction to the technologies it uses.
5. Chapter 6 gives good introduction to technologies like Solr, GAE, JMS. It really shows the power of Spring Roo.
6. I think this book does good justice to the power of Spring Roo.

Cons

1. One thing that I was looking forward was customizing GWT applications. This book talked in detail about the GWT application created about Spring Roo but does not cover how to customize the GWT app.
2. Same is the case with the 7th chapter which cover writing add-ons. The book cover in good detail the default add-on generated by Spring Roo but does not shows how you can customize them to write your own add-ons.
3. This book is based on Spring Roo 1.1.5 Release version but recently Spring Roo has released 1.2 version. Some commands talked in this book are deprecated and are not the recommended now. Also, lot of new features like MongoDB support, JSF support , multi module projects etc. are not there.

Conclusion

Overall I liked the book and I think it is a good book to read if you are thinking of using Spring Roo in future. Yes it is missing some new features but if you will not be using those features this book is a good buy.