A little bit of fresh air for Java Web development

First goal of this project is to show how simple it is to implement an AngularJS application using Spring Boot as a backend, and Bootstrap as a CSS framework. It is freely inspired from the ASP.NET Web API example built by Mathieu and available here: https://github.com/mathieubrun/Samples.AngularBootstrapWebApi.

Second goal is to show what are the framework and tools that we can use today (in 2014) to create light and quick to setup web applications in Java. It leverage on Java 8, Spring Boot, Spring MVC, Thymleaf and AngularJS.

Build and run

Package and run as standalone application:

$ mvn clean package
$ java -jar target/AngularBootstrapSpringBoot-0.1.0.jar

Run inplace and leverage on hot reloading of resources for frontend development:

$ mvn spring-boot:run

Configure

Configure application in application.properties in resources folder (in classpath). This file can be overridden with a copy and specific properties in current dir, config folder in classpath or config folder under current dir. It also supports Spring environment profiles. More info in spring-boot readme.

Nice to have properties

See in src/main/resources/application.properties

TODOs

• enable csrf (find a good way to include token in angularjs requests)
• mvc test

Tips

Java 8

• Download early access from: https://jdk8.java.net/download.html

List of new features

• Mostly lambdas and everything around this (interfaces improvements, functions, streams, enhancement of collection and nio apis)
• New date & time API
• Nashorn JavaScript engine
• Guava inspired stuff like Optional (yes I know), StringJoiner, Comparator chain
• See here for a good overview: http://www.techempower.com/blog/2013/03/26/everything-about-java-8/

Set maven compiler

<plugin>
    <artifactId>maven-compiler-plugin</artifactId>
    <configuration>
        <source>1.8</source>
        <target>1.8</target>
    </configuration>
</plugin>

Lambdas of course...

• See some examples in code
• Read Java 8 in Action: http://www.manning.com/urma/

Date & time API

• The official stuff: https://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=310
• A nice overview: http://www.javacodegeeks.com/2014/03/a-deeper-look-into-the-java-8-date-and-time-api.html
• Jackson support already available: https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-datatype-jsr310
  • Customize ObjectMapper in spring boot to register JSR310 module: https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-boot/blob/master/docs/howto.md#customize-the-jackson-objectmapper

Spring Boot

• Official site and documentation: http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/
• Presentation by Dave Syer, one author: http://presos.dsyer.com/decks/spring-boot-intro.html
• How To: http://spring.io/blog/2014/03/07/deploying-spring-boot-applications
• Deployment: http://spring.io/blog/2014/03/07/deploying-spring-boot-applications
• Spring MVC: http://docs.spring.io/spring/docs/current/spring-framework-reference/html/spring-web.html

Starters

• http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/spring-boot-starters/README.html
• Set of dependency descriptors for your projects:
  • spring-boot-starter-actuator
  • spring-boot-starter-amqp
  • spring-boot-starter-aop
  • spring-boot-starter-batch
  • spring-boot-starter-data-jpa
  • spring-boot-starter-data-mongodb
  • spring-boot-starter-data-rest
  • spring-boot-starter-integration
  • spring-boot-starter-jdbc
  • spring-boot-starter-jetty
  • spring-boot-starter-log4j
  • spring-boot-starter-logging
  • spring-boot-starter-mobile
  • spring-boot-starter-ops
  • spring-boot-starter-parent
  • spring-boot-starter-redis
  • spring-boot-starter-security
  • spring-boot-starter-shell-crsh
  • spring-boot-starter-shell-remote
  • spring-boot-starter-test
  • spring-boot-starter-thymeleaf
  • spring-boot-starter-tomcat
  • spring-boot-starter-web
  • spring-boot-starter-websocket

MVC

• @RestController is same as @Controller and @ResponseBody
• Data validation enabled automatically if hibernate-validator in the classpath (see in pom)
  • @Valid on controller inputs

Actuators

• http://projects.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/spring-boot-actuator/docs/Features.html
• Web endpoints and mbeans
• Add Maven dependency spring-boot-starter-actuator
• management.port = 8081
• management.contextPath = /admin
• http://localhost:8080/admin/configprops
• http://localhost:8080/admin/mappings
• http://localhost:8080/admin/beans
• http://localhost:8080/admin/autoconfig
• http://localhost:8080/admin/trace
• http://localhost:8080/admin/dump
• http://localhost:8080/admin/env
• http://localhost:8080/admin/info
• http://localhost:8080/admin/metrics
• http://localhost:8080/admin/health

Security

• See WebSecurityConfig

Logging

• By default use logback
• Possible to import base configuration:

Webjars

• Client side dependencies exposed as maven artifacts: http://www.webjars.org/
• Automatically published under /webjars
• See example for jquery

Thymleaf

• Java XML / XHTML / HTML5 template engine
• http://www.thymeleaf.org/
• Integration with SpringMVC
• Provide an elegant and well-formed way of creating templates that can be correctly displayed by browsers and therefore work also as static prototypes
• Great interactive tutorial: http://itutorial.thymeleaf.org/

Script inlining

• http://www.thymeleaf.org/doc/html/Using-Thymeleaf.html#script-inlining-javascript-and-dart
• Allows to integrate server side data in javascript
• Supports JS and Dart
• Intelligent evaluation (object are transformed to JSON)

Tests

Code coverage by jacoco

• Early support for Java 8 on branch https://github.com/jacoco/jacoco/tree/0.7.0-BETA
• Add sonatype snapshot repository

Fluent api for assertion

• assertj: http://joel-costigliola.github.io/assertj/index.html
• Fork of fest-assert which was no more maintained

Unit and integration tests

• Configure failsafe plugin for integration tests
  • Name those tests with *IT
• Configure Jacoco to generate specific reports for both unit and integration tests