It’s been a while since I’ve blogged anything here, and this time will be a bit different from the usual.

A few months back I had received interesting feedback in short saying  that I seem to be a more “managerial” person rather than technical. Well I perfectly understand reasoning behind it – especially looking at my recent experience – but… I have always considered myself as software engineer first and later leader or manager. That’s why hearing the aforementioned words gave me very powerful trigger. I’ve made a decision to be more and more involved technically within the software projects I run – essentially I am an Engineer and we all love to solve “puzzles” 🙂

It took me some time to get myself up-to-speed in terms of recent full stack technology (that’s probably why the blogging break was so long) but I’m finally there – to some extent doing hands-on work for living again (aka coding 😀 ).

While familiarizing myself with the recent Java/JS tech world I wasn’t able to find good enough boilerplate project that would satisfy all my needs for a starting point application to play with Java & JS. That’s why after initial learning curve was completed I’ve decided to create one and share it here so that everyone can benefit.

The application itself can be found on github – it’s not very complicated. I believe it gives a nice starting point for anybody who wants to dig into modern full-stack Java & Javascript apps. Namely:

• Server side uses Spring Boot as the main application framework to quickly build a production ready app. That includes, but not limited to:
  • Spring MVC for exposing REST API
  • Spring Data for MongoDB data access layer
• UI side uses React as the main fronted JS framework
• Data storage using MongoDB
• Whole build, bundling and testing is automated using Gradle Wrapper on server side and npm on UI side (detailed instruction on the project page). Additionally worth mentioning for UI side:
  • Webpack module bundler is used to bundle JS code
  • Babel JS compiler is used to allow latest ES6 Javascript features
  • Eslint is used for as JS linting utility
• Automated test suites on different level
  • Server: JUnit unit and integration tests (covering  Rest API and data storage with embedded MongoDB integration)
  • UI: Unit and Integration test using Mocha, Enzyme, Chai and Sinon
  • App: E2E Nightwatch Tests (based on Selenium Web Driver)
• Application integrated with Travis, open-source continuous integration environment
• Using useful lombok project to limit Java boilerplate code
• Possibility to bundle application as one jar or run server & UI separately
• Javascript hot-reloading with webpack dev server

Hopefully somebody besides myself will find it useful. It’s not perfect as I’m still working on it. Also if you think about nice libs/features/fixes that can be added, please do not hesitate to raise an issue or a pull request 🙂