Summing it up there are quite a lot of differences between Roo an Forge, some of them are evident on code metrics.

Code metrics

For instance, aspectj code is not to be touched by human hands and forge replaces almost all java code and xhtml code on regeneration.

A few things on the gui are more pleasante on forge by default and some others on roo. I like the tables and finder pages by default on forge but creation and edition of entities with relations is nicer with autocomplete on Roo.

Things I really do not like are Insecure Object References on Forge with no obvious way to fix it and no calendar picker which should be obvious with a timestamp-date field. On Roo I am missing search filters although pagination by default is nice.

Other thing we are missing is validation on transitions for our state machines and there is no clear way of doing this.

What is impressive is the ammount of time in which a proof of concept with three different cases is created and tested with this tools.

Removing aspectJ code roo has a big lead and it’s strategy for customized code is cleaner than Forge which I suppose is by implementing extensions.

Aside, if we use SpringMVC line reduction is more evident, but still we are not measuring real lines, what we really used are the commands to de CLI of both tools.

For the ammount of effort these line counts are quite impressive.

For now I’ll leave UI as is, I would like to try with another tool like Acceleo, XTend and Vaadin but let’s continue to security.

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