Hi Paul,
Spring Roo is a code generation tool. The examples that I talked about in my blog refer to some of the auto-generated code by Spring Roo, which you can do using an
IDE also. The best practices are related to how the code is structured and how Spring framework features are used. For instance, in an application the interaction between layers is Web --> Service --> DAO. If you are developing a Spring-based application, a good practice is to create different application contexts XML files for objects in the web layer and the dao+service layer. If you are using Spring Roo, then this is automatically done for you. Another example is - Spring Roo scaffolded web layer is RESTful in nature.
regards
ashish