Getting Started with Roo

Getting Started

The Tooling

Spring Roo is based on the sophisticated interplay between several moving parts. To do its work, Spring Roo needs to play a role during your development, and it must be there to help during compilation. This means you need a correctly configured development tool, and a correctly configured build process and test environment, beyond Spring Roo itself. This, as it turns out, is pretty easy to fix. In this section, we’ll set up the SpringSource Tool Suite (STS), a free development environment from SpringSource, based on Eclipse. The SpringSource Tool Suite’s got lots of extra features that makes working with Spring and the sister projects dead simple. Beyond being a particularly nice environment for Spring development, it’s also loaded to the gills with conveniences and useful-to-have packages. SpringSource Tool Suite always follows the main releases of Eclipse pretty closely, but integrates numerous plugins that can be a pain to set up independently, but that most people have to set up, anyway, like the Maven M2Eclipse plugin, or plugins for various source-code management options that aren’t included by default. It is effectively a subset of the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers, with a large superset of functionality integrated to reflect the realities of modern day enterprise Java development. We’ll use it throughout the book because it represents the path of least resistance and it’s a very capable choice, as well!

Because Spring Roo takes away so much ...