Current status on Roo addon with Spring Tools IDE and Surf?

[edfarias]

Hello!

I'm new to Alfresco and I'm looking  to use its CMS capabilities for a project that I'm working on. It looks like a great tool and have found several tutorials to use it and work with scripts in order to modify the content and work along with it.

Sadly most of the video tutorials are quite old and it seems that all the tools and addons are no longer working
-SpringSource Tool no longer supports SpringSurf last relese (1.0.0) due to FreeMarker dependencies
-Spring Roo newest version no longer recognizes the spring-surf-addon

Having this, how Alfreco development should be addressed? I understand that it is still heavily based on Surf but, what development tools can I use then? Eclipse (newest version)? WebScript Library?

Should I not consider Roo anymore?

I really appreciate any help on this. Thanks a lot in advance!
Daniel

[jpotts]

I realize we could do a better job of documenting/recommending developer setup for new developers. We do have a team dedicated to "the platform", which includes improving our development tools and the SDK. So look for improvements to come this year.

I'll let someone else comment on the status of the specific projects you mentioned because I honestly don't know their status. Dr. Yong Qu was heavily involved in the Roo stuff. He has since left Alfresco and I'm not sure anyone has picked it up. I can tell you that I never really got into Roo or STS. Maybe that's because most of the customization work I've done has been against Share instead of building Surf apps from scratch. It just seemed like Roo was useful when you were first starting out, to figure out where things went and to save you from having to type boiler plate, but once you got beyond that, it was of limited use. Others feel free to disagree.

In my Alfresco projects I always use straight Eclipse. Sometimes I'll have emacs pulled up as well because I like it for cruising around the Share web scripts, surf data objects, and client-side JavaScript.

If you haven't found it already, do take a look at the Share Extras project on Google Code. It has some sample projects you can use as a starting point for your own projects as well as plenty of Share customization examples.

Jeff

[ddraper]

This question has come up quite a few times recently… I can categorically state that you should NOT consider Roo a viable approach for developing Surf applications. As Jeff said this was worked on by Dr. Yong Qu who hasn't worked for the company for a long time and there has been no development on the Roo development tooling since he left.

I haven't used STS recently but I'm not sure why it would not continue to support Surf development because of a FreeMarker dependency. Ultimately a FreeMarker file is just text and can be edited with any editor although you should still be able to download and install the FreeMarker editor plugin from the JBoss software site (as you can with any Eclipse IDE).

There is a lack of good Surf development documentation and this is probably more of a problem than an absence of tooling because once you get the hang of it, Surf development is really quite straightforward and can be accomplished with basic text editors.

If you have specific issues with Surf then please post them on the forum and we'll do our best to answer them,

Regards,
Dave