Appfuse vs. Roo, what would you use and why?
What are the sweet spots of each.
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As per the answer I gave to TheServerSide thread on this issue…:
AppFuse aims to provide a single initial scaffold of your new project. This is similar to Maven archetypes or Eclipse’s “new project” features in that you run them once at the start of a new project and then you maintain the scaffolded code going forward. The scaffold system has no further involvement in your project once you’ve run it once.
Roo, on the other hand, provides a round-trip aware active code generator for your long-term usage on a given project. As such Roo offers value both at initial creation time as well as whenever you are modifying the project going forward.
In practical terms this means as you evolve your project, Roo will automatically maintain certain files. To take a simple example, when you add (or remove) a field, Roo will update the toString, getters/setters, JSP pages etc for you automatically. It also offers commands so you can add new capabilities later. So if you need to add security six months after you created the project, you just “security setup“. Or if you need to send emails, you just “http://static.springsource.org/spring-roo/reference/html/command-index.html#command-index-email-sender-setup“. There are similar commands for many other capability areas well, such as Spring Web Flow, JUnit, Selenium, common JPA providers etc. You just defer the decision as long as you like, and Roo will only add those capabilities at the time you ask for them (and it will also automatically use those new capabilities in your project).
There are many other differences as well. Roo allows extension via user-developed add-ons, it offers a highly usable shell, it allows you to incrementally build a new project and add features only when required, it extensively supports the latest versions of the major Spring technologies, it comes with a SpringSource-developed (and therefore endorsed) application architecture and so on.
A read of the Roo Reference Guide’s Introduction Chapter or simply completing the ten minute test project will illustrate they are very different in approach.