Getting Hip with JHipster at Denver's Java User Group
Last night, I had the pleasure of speaking at Denver's Java User Group Meetup about JHipster. I've been a big fan of JHipster ever since I started using it last fall. I developed a quick prototype for a client and wrote about solving some issues I had with it on OS X. I like the project because it encapsulates the primary open source tools I've been using for the last couple of years: Spring Boot, AngularJS and Bootstrap. I also wrote about its 2.0 release on InfoQ in January.
To add some humor to my talk, I showed up as a well-dressed Java Developer. Like a mature gentleman might do, I started the evening with a glass of scotch (Glenlivet 12). Throughout the talk I became more hip and adjusted my attire, and beverage, accordingly. As you might expect, my demos had failures. The initial project creation stalled during Bower's download all JavaScript dependencies. Luckily, I had a backup and was able to proceed. Towards the end, when I tried to deploy to Heroku, I was presented with a lovely message that "Heroku toolbelt updating, please try again later". I guess auto-updating has its downsides.
After finishing the demo, I cracked open a cold PBR to ease my frustration.
I did two live coding sessions during this presentation; standing on the shoulders of giants to do so. I modeled Josh Long's Getting Started with Spring Boot to create a quick introduction to Spring Boot. IntelliJ IDEA 14.1 has a nice way to create Spring Boot projects, so that came in handy. For the JHipster portion, I created a blogging app and used relationships and business logic similar to what Julien Dubois did in his JHipster for Spring Boot Webinar. Watching Josh and Julien's demos will give you a similar experience to what DJUG attendees experienced last night, without the download/deployment failures.
You can click through my presentation below, download it from my presentations page, or view it on SlideShare.
You might notice my announcement on slide #32 that I've signed up to write a book on JHipster.
I haven't started writing the book yet, but I have been talking with InfoQ and other folks about it for several months. I plan to use Asciidoctor and Gradle as my authoring tools. If you have experience writing a book with these tools, I'd love to hear about it. If you've developed an application with JHipster and have some experience in the trenches, I'd love to hear your stories too.
As I told DJUG last night, I plan to be done with the book in a few months. However, if you've been a reader of this blog, you'll know I've been planning to be done with my '66 VW Bus in just a few more months for quite some time, so that phrase has an interesting meaning for me. 
Nice. Its always pleasure to read your write-ups and presentations.
What's your call on light-weight framework http://sparkjava.com/ completely java-8(first one I guess with lambdas) based framework. With angularJS doing all the heavy-lifting, this looks to simplest to start serving jsons to UI of all I have seen so far.
Posted by Praveen on April 09, 2015 at 11:40 AM MDT #
Hello Praveen! First of all, thanks for being a reader. Secondly, I have not used Spark Java, but it looks pretty darn cool. It's even got more stars on GitHub than JHipster (2183 vs 1899)!
I know Spring really well, so Spring Boot appeals to me quite a bit. I also like how it provides features like profiles and auditing, health and metrics with spring-boot-actuator.
If you've used Spark Java on a project, I'd love to hear about it.
Posted by Matt Raible on April 09, 2015 at 01:41 PM MDT #
Posted by Carlos Adolfo Ortiz Q on April 21, 2015 at 10:02 PM MDT #
Carlos - SpringJava seems similar to Spring MVC, but requires less annotations. It reminds me of Grails, but uses Java 8 instead of Groovy.
For the next version of AppFuse, I hope to migrate its XML configuration to Java Config and possibly make it based on Spring Boot. This will make it similar to JHipster's backend. We could add an AngularJS front end to AppFuse, but JHipster already provides something similar (and likely better). So yes, JHipster is a logical and modern evolution of AppFuse. That's why I'm writing a book about it! :)
Posted by Matt Raible on April 23, 2015 at 10:11 AM MDT #
Hi Matt Raible and everyone
I just discovered jhipster a few days ago. I think is a good framework to perform Java web applications and i'll like to learn and use it. Just wanted to ask if you have links where i can fine java web applications made of with Jhipster and few tutorials.
thank you
Posted by idriss on November 19, 2015 at 06:14 AM MST #
Hello idriss!
I'd suggest downloading and reading the recently-published JHipster Mini-Book. You could also watch the presentation I did at Devoxx Belgium this year. You can find links to both of these at http://www.jhipster-book.com/#!/news/entry/jhipster-at-devoxx-belgium.
Posted by Matt Raible on November 19, 2015 at 06:22 AM MST #