What initially brought me back to look at Roo again is the fact that Bruce Johnson the lead developer for GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and Ben Alex the creator of Roo was on stage at the Google IO keynote this year and announced a partnership between the two teams. Well I am already sold on GWT for building RIA style applications and this meant I needed to pull up the Roo home page and give it a second look.
The point that I want to make today is that the whole download of Roo is around 5MB. That is impressive. I checked the Grails download and it sits around 41MB. For someone that likes to keep there code lean and mean as possible this is very cool!
A little closer look at the spring-roo distribution reveals that they are using Apache Felix for their platform. From my 10 seconds of research on Felix it looks like an OSGi container.
The last thing of note for me about Roo is the fact that the samples come as scripts that get executed in the shell. The shell actually generates the applications on the fly. I like the fact that you can potentially write a script that will generate scaffolding for the application and the application itself. I know, I know grails create-app... but that only creates a default application and then you need to run additional commands to create domains, controllers, views, etc... granted that can all be in a single .bat or .sh but that is not the standard procedure for Grails. Roo is designed to handle this kind of generation and provides commands for creating the fields and restraints.
Loving the tab completion too!
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