Getting started with Spring Web Flow

In Chapter 4, Web Application Development with Spring Web MVC we saw that Roo simplifies building Spring Web MVC applications. In this recipe, we'll look at how Roo sets up your Roo project to use Spring Web Flow—a framework that is built on top of Spring Web MVC.

Spring Web Flow allows modelling a web application as a set of flows, where each flow represents a finite state machine.

Note

The support for Spring Web Flow is broken in Spring Roo 1.1.3; therefore, you must use Spring Roo 1.1.4 or 1.1.5 to execute this recipe. This recipe has been developed using Spring Roo 1.1.5.

Getting ready

Create a new directory C:\roo-cookbook\ch05-webflow in your system and copy the ch05_webflow_app.roo script that accompanies this book to the ch05-webflow directory.

Start the Roo shell from the ch05-webflow directory and execute the ch05_webflow_app.roo script using the script command. Executing the ch05_webflow_app.roo script creates a flightapp-webflow Eclipse project...