Question

Want to fast implement little web-app using:

• Spring MVC
• GWT for frontend
• Hibernate
• Maven

(found that Spring Roo provide most of needed architecture)

Problem is, I have exiting Mongo database.

Is any way to create data schema from existing mongo database (found reverse engineering for relational databases)? Or i have to define entities, according to mongo db by hand?

Answer 1

We’ve once tried to pursue a rapid prototyping approach for an auto-generated backend based on an existing MongoDB database. The code is open source and available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/springmorphia/

Disclaimer:

• This is a student’s bachelor thesis, so you might want to review the code.
• We’ve never used it for its intended purpose, since we were not too thrilled with Spring Roo (specifically the stability of the API, number of bugs we ran into,…).
• However, this project is more than a year old, so things might have improved. Which also means that the Spring Roo version is heavily outdated.

It’s probably a good starting point if you want to head in that direction.

If you don’t intend to use a rapid prototyping approach, I’d still rebuild the database once and import the existing data. Only if you want to continuously generate your code based on an evolving database it will pay of, IMHO.