What is Roo?

Roo is a Rapid Application Development (RAD) tool for Java Developers.

If you have the domain model at hand, you should be creating a fully functional webapp in about 15 minutes - this includes unit and integration testing, entities, MVC controllers, web pages (jsp), tiles templates etc.

As far as I can say, Roo does a pretty good job in creating such projects in no time.

What's best is that once you have created the project using Roo, you can record the steps in a script (a text file) and ask your co-developer to run the script to re-create the project on his machine.

As we all know, Java world does lack RAD tools to some extent - Roo is bridging this gap by making developer's time more productive.

The mission statement from Roo's team is: "fundamentally and sustainably improve Java developer productivity without compromising engineering integrity or flexibility"

Roo has a great command-line-shell with absolute usability features - I think should be recommended to everyone who starts with Roo - and I am convinced that they will fall in love with that.

You start a project from a clean state and ask what to do in the shell by typing hint command and it would let you guide through the process. For example, if it find no project in the current directory, tt would hint you to run a command project followed by entities creation (from your domain model) etc etc.

One of the great things that I see about the Roo is that it has a plugin kind of feature (called as Addons) where it can be plugged in with thirdparty or customised or in-house developed Addons. This makes it quite extensible (like Eclipse plugin architecute) - so if you wish to develop a inhouse plugin, do that and deploy in the specified "addons" directory as a zip file and it would automatically available for you at the shell.

I did find the tool quite promising - especially with the plugin (addons) so one can expect thirdparty addons to grow in number in no time!