Question

I want to build a GWT application that doesn’t use a database. I thought to use Spring ROO to get the initial configurations for it. A Spring ROO+GWT generated app has:

• RequestFactory based client-server communication
• MVP pattern applied
• Activities, places, browser history management
• [1] UIBinder-based UIs that use *.ui.xml files for UI definitions
• [4] a lot of generated activities in /client/managed/activity

• [5] a lot of generated UIs in /client/managed/ui – all of them use UIBinder

• Spring integration

• [2] Spring MVC integration
• [3] Hibernate(or other JPA implementation) integration

I don’t want [1], [2], [3] features from it.

Questions

1. About [1], I intend to have my own UIs that don’t necessarily use UIBinder. How do I do that?
2. What if I want a different logic/layout for the app? Is it safe to remove [4] and [5] and then generate my own MVP components? How do I do that – I don’t necessarily care to keep Spring ROO support in the app, I just want to change the scaffold app and build something totally different. I saw that when I add a field in the domain bean, it automatically generate UIs, and [4],[5]

Answer 1

One of the selling points for Roo is that you can easily remove it from your project. Nothing in the Roo-generated code presupposes that you will continue to use Roo indefinitely. The GWT Expenses sample app actually started off as a Roo-generated app, but has become a manually-maintained codebase.

To your first point, UiBinder doesn’t do anything that you can’t write by hand. All of the declarative XML code that you would write just gets turned into straight procedural code by the UiBinder Generator. To remove a UiBinder-based UI, just delete the .ui.xml file and the custom UiBinder sub-interface.