This is my first book with O’Reilly, and I’m very grateful for their help and encouragement.
Their editorial team is first class, and efficient. It was great working with you.
I, like many of you, have been using Spring for a long, long time. I wasn’t initially
convinced I needed Spring Roo (to be honest). It wasn’t until I sat with Ben Alex and
Stefan Schmidt about a year ago and really started looking at it that I realized it was
simply too valuable to ignore. There’s a lot of power here and what really struck me
was how that power didn’t imply compromise: you can always go home again, and
assert full control over your application. Eventually, you stop worrying about that at
all, and just let Spring Roo do the work. One adage you hear a lot in the devops/build
tool world is that, “your application is not a unique snowflake.” That’s true of infrastructure
code, too. Spring Roo helps you bootstrap all that tedious infrastructure code,
if you let it. It’s like fast-forwarding a movie to the fun parts, quicker. It almost feels
like cheating!
I want to thank my coauthor, Steve Mayzak, for all his help. We did this book and
prepared a talk for OSCON, all in a very short space. It was a three-person job, but he
took up the slack and got us to the finish line. Amazing work and I definitely owe you,
kind sir.
I want to thank my wife, Richelle. She’s learned, I think, that I am not a multitasking
husband. Every now and then, I disappear into our home office and come back with a
beard a week later (and, sometimes, some useful byproduct like a chapter or working
code). It takes a patient, saintly woman to suffer that; she has, at every turn. Thanks,
honey!
I want to thank Neo4J and Vaadin for their extra help on this book. Roo’s powerful
add-on architecture makes it very easy to look into new technologies because the cost
to invest is so low, and iteration is very quick. Neo4j and Vaadin are two technologies
that we cover in this book, but there are numerous other examples in the addon ecosystem,
and I hope—if nothing else—that you’ll explore.