Spring Roo: Persistence Setup

I've found Spring Roo to be a great way to learn how to setup configuration properly.  As I continue to spend time in configuring my home project, I continue to be amazed at the powerful features that Roo brings to the table. I had written a small application for tracking family chores. I spent about 25 minutes drawing the entities in a napkin, then spent 10 minutes writing a Roo script (file with extension "roo"). Then, I opened a Roo shell and run "script myscript.roo". This created my project, including all the scaffolding for my entities.  I had my project running in minutes. After a while, I detected a problem with my entities relationship and wanted to see the persisted data. Of course, I had the the "IN MEMORY" choice, which brought all sort of problems when trying to see the data within.

My Review on Spring-Roo

So I gave a presentation about Spring Roo recently. Hopefully this means I'll get a kangaroo.  I felt it went pretty well. I decided to share some of my remarks as I think I learned more by presenting than by trying it. As I can not put a presentation on my document (yet), I'll show the text of my slides and will explain some of the things I discussed while presenting.

Understading some of Roo's magic

  I must admit that I was among the many developers I know who are very skeptical about Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP).  I've written many aspects myself, some which I now define as "entry-level".  I had not seen a clear use-case for aspects other than the basic "auditing", "logging" or "security" use cases.  So, a few months ago I started to play with one of the latest tools from SpringSource, namely Spring-Roo. To my surprise, Roo was not only meeting my expectations, but also made me a believer on yet another good use case for AOP.  The use case of tooling support.  I'll try to explain some of the magic which Roo brings to software development using AspectJ.