Spring Data

Chapter 9. Persistence Layers with Spring Roo

Spring Roo is a rapid application development tool for Java developers. With Roo, you can easily build full Java applications in minutes.

We won’t be covering all aspects of Roo development in this chapter. We will focus on the new repository support for JPA and MongoDB that uses Spring Data to provide this support. If you want to read more about Roo, go to the Spring Roo project home page, where you can find links to the reference manual. While on the project home page, look for a link to download a free O’Reilly ebook by Josh Long and Steve Mayzak called Getting Started with Roo [LongMay11]. This ebook covers an older 1.1 version of Roo that does not support the repository layer, but it is a good introduction to Roo in general. The most up-to-date guide for using Spring Roo is Spring Roo in Action by Ken Rimple and Srini Penchikala [RimPen12].

A Brief Introduction to Roo

Roo works its magic using code generation combined with AspectJ for injecting behavior into your domain and web classes. When you work on a Roo project, the project files are monitored by Roo and additional artifacts are generated. You still have your regular Java classes that you can edit, but there are additional features provided for free. When you create a class with Roo and annotate that class with one or more annotations that provide additional capabilities, Roo will generate a corresponding AspectJ file that contains one or more AspectJ inter type declarations ...