Book Image

Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook

Book Image

Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook

Overview of this book

Spring Roo is an easy-to-use productivity tool for rapidly developing Java enterprise applications using well-recognized frameworks such as Spring, Hibernate, AspectJ, Spring Web Flow, Spring Security, GWT, and so on. Spring Roo takes care of creating maven-enabled projects, enterprise application architecture based on your choice of technologies, unit/integration tests based on your choice of testing framework, and so on. The bottom line is that if you're using Spring, then you must consider using Spring Roo for increased productivity. Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook brings together a collection of recipes that demonstrate how the Spring Roo developer tool simplifies rapidly developing enterprise applications using standard technologies/frameworks such as JPA, GWT, Spring, Flex, Spring Web Flow, Spring Security, and so on. It introduces readers to developing enterprise applications for the real world using Spring Roo tool. The book starts off with basic recipes to make readers comfortable with using Spring Roo tool. As the book progresses, readers are introduced to more sophisticated features supported by Spring Roo in the context of a Flight Booking application. In a step-by-step by fashion, each recipe shows how a particular activity is performed, what Spring Roo does when a command is executed, and why it is important in the context of the application being developed. Initially, you make a quick start with using Spring Roo through some simple recipes. Then you learn how Spring Roo simplifies creating the persistence layer of an enterprise application using JPA. You are introduced to the various roo commands to create JPA entities, create relationships between JPA entities, create integration tests using Spring TestContext framework, and so on. Following this, the book shows you how Spring Roo simplifies creating the web layer of an enterprise application using Spring Web MVC, Spring Web Flow, and how to create selenium tests for controller objects. Subsequently, we focus on using Spring-BlazeDS, GWT, JSON, and so on. Spring Roo commands that are used to incorporate e-mail/messaging features into an enterprise application are demonstrated next. Finally, we wrap it up with some miscellaneous recipes that show how to extend Spring Roo via add-ons, incorporate security, create cloud-ready applications, remove Spring Roo from your enterprise application, and so on.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Spring Roo 1.1 Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating entities from a database


In many application development scenarios, an application needs to be designed for an existing database or the application development starts after the database has been created. To support such scenarios, Roo provides the database reverse engineer command to auto-generate JPA entities from database metadata. As we'll see later in this recipe, Roo provides incremental database reverse engineering, that is, you can execute the database reverse engineer command each time the database changes occur and leave it up to Roo to update JPA entity definitions based on the changes in the database.

The following figure shows tables of the database that we will reverse engineer using the database reverse engineer command:

Getting ready

Refer to the Generating database metadata recipe to create the Roo project, to create the myflightappdb database, tables, and views in MySQL, and install the JDBC driver for MySQL.

How to do it...

To create entities from a database, execute...