Refactorings

I’ve been playing with Spring Roo a bit over the past few days while taking fresh look at which agile web frameworks exist in the Java world.

One of the things I liked about Roo is that there is no run-time / scripted portion of Roo, it really highlights how great AOP can be.

One thing that’s kind of nice that I sort of wish you could find in either Symfony or Rails is the ‘finder list’ function of the Roo shell.

During / after definition of your model with Roo shell, you can use the finder list command to list available finder generation for a given class:

Basically the finder list command will list a sensible default set of finders for operating on a class field, based on it’s type.

Quite often you’ll want something more complex than these, such as ‘findActiveGoalsBetween(Date d1, Date d2) but using the default ‘between’ finder stub would be a good jump-start on that.

I look forward to exploring Roo more!

As a side note, if any of you want to start playing with Roo, I’d strongly recommend simply installing the SpringSource Tool Suite. I spent about an hour trying to include the assorted plugins I wanted within the default eclipse JEE install, it’s just easier to download STS.