The Spring Roo shell is based on JLine, but contains a large number of design elements oriented around usability that are not present in JLine. You can read the shell philosophy section of the Roo reference guide for a brief treatment of some of these enhancements. We ve also integrated JANSI to provide a colour shell for Windows users.
We intend to split out the shell from Spring Roo in due course and create a separate project called "Spring Shell". The timeframe for this work has not been finalised, though. In the meantime if you checkout Roo from SVN you ll be able to get use the shell with minimal dependencies and Roo-specific conventions. Using the @Cli* annotations to setup shell commands is also very easy, and you can see examples of this in the remainder of the Roo source code.