I am looking for feedback from experienced users on spring roo and appfuse. Which do you think does a better job reverse engineering database tables and generating a service layer, dao layer, and jpa entities?
If I am not mistaken, spring roo currently cannot reverse engineer a database.
You are correct that you can't reverse engineer a database in Roo. There's an open JIRA item for this which you can vote up.
However, you could try using the Eclipse Hibernate tools to reverse engineer your database, then modify those objects to make them Roo Entities. That probably would involve a lot of manual work though.
For AppFuse, there's the AppFuse Maven plugin which can create the entire AppFuse project for you from an existing database. I'm not sure if it's currently working though, because the last person I mentioned it to said they couldn't get it working.
Depending on your requirements, you may also want to give the Grails framework a try. There's a tool called GRAG that can reverse engineer a Grails application from a database.
The ROO-435 issue is actually our most requested feature, so I'll be implementing that in Spring Roo within the next few weeks. In the meantime, Jason's suggestion of using the Eclipse Hibernate tools to create JPA annotated entities is an immediate solution that is fully Roo compatible.
Roo is good to quickly put up stuff up (round-tripping is amazing)..but the lack of out-of-the-box provide for a services layer puts my needs in a bind. I know I can do @Services annotation and place code appropriately as mentioned in the documentation(too much work at startup). I wished Roo gave me a choice to have a services+dao layer...out-of-the-box. That would (have made)/make Roo a killer app, imho