Installing

Well, it wasn't really as smooth as I had thought. I'm not sure how much of it was me "thinking" I was reading the instructions correctly, and how much of it was little bugs here and there.

In saying that, the docs at http://www.springsurf.org/sites/1.0.0.M2/spring-surf-devtools/spring-surf-roo-addon/reference/html/intro.html are really good and a credit to the developers that a framework that is still in its infancy is coming with such detailed docs. Some points to note are:

1. The main problem I had was in the deployment to the tomcat server. When typing in mvn tomcat:deploy it produced a whole load of what I thought were errors and attempts to download various pieces of software from repos located around the net. The main issue was with me not having setting up the tomcat config as per the docs. I didn't realise that maven was using that user to deploy the application (although...thinking about it...it does make sense!)
2. I had some other issues when it came to deployment and maven trying to reference the old roo plugin and not the updated one. Uninstalling the plugin from the roo console using:
   
   addon uninstall *surf*.zip
   
   and then reinstalling the plugin with
   
   addon install --url file:/path/to/file
   
   Also helpful to do a clean using
   
   mvn clean
   
   
3. When trying to access the extra surf commands, it's important to realise that you wont actually be able to do this until the application has successfully deployed. Once that has happened it should come up fine.
   
4. Other problems encountered were simply me not reading the docs closely enough. Serves me right for trying to do this at a weekend.