Spring Roo goes a step beyond the Spring Framework by bringing true Rapid Application Development to Java—just as Grails has done with Groovy. This concise introduction shows you how to build applications with Roo, using the framework's shell as an intelligent and timesaving code-completion tool. It's an ideal RAD tool because Roo does much of the tedious code maintenance.

You'll get started by building a simple customer relationship management application, complete with step-by-step instructions and code examples. Learn how to control any part of the application with Roo's opt-in feature, while using this open source framework to automate the rest of the code.

Set up a Spring application and working Maven build to see Roo in action
Address persistence with JPA and the Neo4j graph database—and learn how Roo supports NoSQL databases
Use Roo’s database reverse-engineering feature to generate a data model from an existing schema
Build Roo applications with Spring MVC, Spring WebFlow, Google Web Toolkit, Vaadin, and other web frameworks
Secure and test your application