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