The PR looks very nice. Great work.
Love the minimal archetype :-) thx!
Kind regards, Ivo.
hell folks. We finally have a PR for Jakarta 9 and Payara. This was done by Bazluer and I. Thanks for your help, Bazlur, you made the code so much cleaner!
@Reza, I'm thinking about merging it before merge your changes since i think it will be easier to pull our chages into yours. Let me know what you think.
Em dom., 8 de mai. de 2022 às 01:37, A N M Bazlur Rahman < bazlur@xxxxxxxxx> escreveu: Yes, indeed we would be needing a server to run the archetypes if we want to facilitate zip to download. A simple servlet running on a tomcat would suffice I believe. We just have to know what Eclipse Foundation can offer here. Btw If we go with this approach, I can help write the servlet. It would be fun to write a Servlet after all the years. Thank you, - A N M Bazlur Rahman
![]() On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 9:59 AM Ivo Woltring < ivo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: Hi all,
@Reza I actually think that seasoned devs will absolutely use the archetype if it is simple enough. That is the only reason I wrote mine. I use them all the time. I would actually say that junior programmers tend to copy and paste other projects to get a new one and seasoned programmers use archetypes. That is actually one of the reasons I am opposed to having too much in there.
Am I correct in understanding that we want to run the archetypes on a server and present a zip as download? I think that I am missing part of the conversation here?!
Have a nice weekend. Ivo.
To be honest, I am going to be very pleasantly surprised if any seasoned developers use the starter. My guess is that is where Ivo’s minimal template is most applicable. I kind of suspect the primary audience for the starter is newcomers or people evaluating Jakarta EE. That’s for who generating a good working example showcasing the basics really shines (that’s who gives the most glowing feedback for the Azure Functions Archetype).
100% agree it’s super important for the UI experience to be as beginner friendly as possible for the same reasons, so downloading a zip is the way to go.
Also 100% agree with regards to mvnw. I’ll add that in the next PR as an option.
I’m curious about one thing: who is our target audience for this starter project? - Seasoned JavaEE developers/Spring developers - Java developers with a few years of experience but who didn’t work with Jakarta EE - Absolute Java beginner By the way, for the absolute beginners, whatever we do, this is going to be difficult. They would even have difficulties understanding how maven works. In that case, UI is a kind of a must. And the UI has to provide downloadable zip I, in fact, work with junior developers, and over the year, I have found that, if something goes a bit difficult at the beginning, the motivation immediately goes negative, and they would want to try something else. One more thing, can we also consider adding the Maven wrapper (mvnw)? That way, the developers don't even have to download the maven. If someone wants to just try out quickly, s/he doesn't have to go through the maven installation process. Thanks. ![]() Oops, I completely forgot the end of the week was tomorrow. Then I'll try to have it finished by the weekend :)
Great. I’ll wait until tomorrow for any further input. Then I’ll start the merging process at the Archetype level.
He Reza,
Thanks for the tips!
Today I’ve:
A start has been made :-)
Have a nice evening.
Kind regards,
Ivo @ivonet
This is great. We should wait a tiny bit and unless there are objections from anyone else I suggest the following course of action, roughly in order. * Could you kindly change all your potentially donated code to EPL: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/starter/blob/master/LICENSE? I believe this ensures basically no legal trouble. Please let us know when that is done? * Since bringing in the minimal Archetype will involve some work, I suggest the most efficient way to get it done is for me to simply work on a PR. It will involve addressing the gaps I noted, adding support for multiple target runtimes as well as introducing Maven modules. I think I can easily do this by the end of this weekend. You and others can review the PR.
* As you are aware, Jeyvison has already started working on Jakarta EE 9 support. I think it's best to wait a bit for him to properly finish that work. So I will just stick to Jakarta EE 8 runtimes for my merge effort. Done the right way, adding Jakarta EE 9/10 support should be quite trivial. * I think Ivo, it would be great if you could start the UI effort in parallel. I won't attempt to pull in the UI that is there now. I suggest starting a fresh thread on the UI (this one I think is already a bit convoluted). The first decision is actually choosing the backend technology. Ivar and the Eclipse Foundation should help guide us with that. The basic experience should be allowing the user to choose some high level functional parameters and letting them download a zip file that is ready to go I think. Whether we like it or not, Spring/Quarkus/MicroProfile starters are probably our baseline target experience to a large extent. That said, let's kindly discuss on a separate thread and hopefully others will also chime in with regards to the right direction.
P.S.: * I think we all can agree the MicroProfile/Jakarta EE situation is very unfortunate. Unless you have already done so, I suggest sharing your viewpoints here: https://accounts.eclipse.org/mailing-list/cn4j-alliance. I advise keeping modest expectations. Change in the "right direction" has been incredibly slow.
* If best practices, clean code and architecture is your passion, have you considered Eclipse Cargo Tracker: https://eclipse-ee4j.github.io/cargotracker/?
On 5/4/22 3:54 PM, Ivo Woltring wrote:
Hi Reza, Edwin, et all,
It is a darn shame that JakartaEE and Microprofile are still not together (just my humble opinion). The fact is that both are incomplete without the other. In my archetypes I have put them together because I think they should be. Having said that I completely understand that it may not be politically advisable at this time to combine them. The trouble is that Runtimes like Payara just give them to you even if you do not define them. As long as they are separate but open source projects they should be usable right? Spring uses every kind of dependency they need. Why shouldn’t we? But this discussion should not keep us from coming together and make something nice :-)
@Reza I agree with almost all your points on my code. It is clear that you took a good look at them :-) I tent to document my work with actually usable things. That is the reason behind the bash scripts. If something is a command why not make it executable? It brings its own form of documentation. I have indeed never integrated my code with github actions. I have never had the time te really dive into the actions and it is till on my todo list and some of my archetypes are from before github actions were launched :-). I will bump it up on my priority list.
I most certainly agree that most of the code should work on its own without docker. I am a docker fan and I made the archetypes in essence for myself… so docker is a logical choice for me. I hate installing software if I do not have to :-)
The license issue is IMHO solved easily right? I’ll just change them. I have that right or don’t I as the sole committer on my projects?
@Edwin I like your summary. And yes the state of my archetypes represent the need I had at the time. They are actually a very minor effort on my part, but as I have some users I feel obliged to update the archetype(s) now and again even if I am not actively working on or with them at this time. This is my main drive to start this discussion and hope to find a way to work together.
@Reza do you have an idea on what I can do to prepare for a more easy merge? I have no ego as far as my archetypes are concerned, we can do nothing, anything or everything to them as far as I am concerned. My ego emerges only on discussions pertaining clean code and best practices and the like 😄.
Is there a clear idea on what the UI needs to do? - will we be working with archetypes the user needs to run themselves or generate a zip like Spring does? - do we actually want the same thing as spring does?
Kind regards, Ivo.
Hi Reza and all,
I have caught up with this thread but haven't found time to look at the code myself - yet. Though I would like to respond to your comments.
I think your summary/analysis is very sound and feel that I would make the same conclusions when diving into the project. After all, I know where the project came from so I have a bit of background knowledge. What I would like to say is that you are right that we need to fix some issues regarding the Jakarta EE/MicroProfile alignment, Maven and Docker relation and or dependencies in the project. The fact that the project is in a certain state and does or doesn't contain some features, is because it came from Ivo's mind to experiment with the full stack. It's not impossible to decouple things if effort is put into this, and Ivo agrees with this of course.
Please correct me if I'm wrong but I hope this project forms a solid base for starter efforts to come.
Kind regards,
Edwin One additional detail to add - if we all agree the UI experience is not centered on surfacing the use of Archetypes that the user then needs to manually invoke themselves but should be more like what the Spring/Quarkus/MicroProfil/etc starter experience looks like, we still need to sort through what the backend technology for the UI will be. I suggest going with whatever is most easily provided by the Eclipse Foundation. Invoking an Archetype behind the scenes can be done with anything that can make a command line invocation on the server-side (could even be node.js if we want to stick to JS on the server-side too).
As promised, I took some time to carefully take a look at Ivo’s work. I am sharing my thoughts on it. I hope other folks here also do a bit of analysis and chime in with their thoughts so we can move forward to deliver value for the community. - I think the clearest alignment is with regards to bringing in the UI. I think the current UI code exposes too much of the underlying Archetypes. I think from a UI perspective, the fact that Archetypes are used under the hood at all are an implementation detail. The user should mostly be concerned with higher level functional parameters such as the generation use case (e.g. minimal/REST CRUD/JSF CRUD/etc), Jakarta EE version, target runtime, generated artifact metadata and so on. This is after all the experience for the Spring initializer, etc. However, overall I think these are minor deltas and UI code looks fairly sound.
- The code is definitely focused on minimal generation, just with a simple POM, Jakarta EE deployment descriptors and a very simple hello world REST endpoint. I don’t think it does any real harm to add this option to the starter here. Overall, the amount of additional code would be very small (perhaps in the order of a few hundred lines). I do think the nature of the generated code is different enough to warrant *one* separate Archetype with a robust post processing script that handles minor variants like target runtime and Jakarta EE version.
- The examples mix and match MicroProfile and Jakarta EE. Given the ongoing Jakarta EE and MicroProfile alignment conversations, I think we need to tread carefully here and maybe even ask for advise from the Jakarta EE steering committee/platform specification. For one, it makes the situation odd for runtimes like GlassFish. My inclination is to stick to vanilla Jakarta EE in this starter for now and just stay out of a potentially contentious conversation.
- The code makes no effort in trying to use Maven plugins to have a self-contained runtime experience right from Maven (e.g. mvn clean package tomee:run). Honestly I believe this is a mistake. With embedded runtimes like Spring Boot, Quarkus, etc developers expect to run/test applications right from Maven. I think even in a minimal starter project, having this is important in order to position Jakarta EE as something modern. This is what we have in the starter already for reference.
- The code really is quite dependent on Docker, going as far as making an assumption that users must have a Docker Hub account. Honestly I think this too is a usability mistake. Many developers are still very new to containers so needlessly aligning too much with Docker is a potential usability hazard that I don’t think we really need to get into. It should be mostly possible to use the starter without Docker at all and still have easily running code.
- The code has a number of scripts that abstract over relatively simple Docker commands. This can actually lead to the impression that using Jakarta EE with Docker is so difficult that you need scripts to deal with the complexity. I suggest we simply generate a Dockerfile and document the few relatively simple commands to build a Docker image that contains the Jakarta EE application and run the Docker image. This is what we have now for reference.
- The code does not utilize GitHub Actions or any other kind of automated sanity checks/tests. I think we absolutely need that for a distributed project with many potential contributors.
- There is no index page and the documentation is quite minimal. Since we have quite a bit more visibility as an official Jakarta EE umbrella project, we will obviously need to improve that.
If this all seems reasonable to most folks here, I am happy to begin working on a PR to basically merge the efforts (I may need a tiny bit of help with the UI as I am not that proficient with JS yet). I think this is small enough to just be a few evenings’ effort. I could get it done by the end of the weekend so we can keep focusing on forward progress delivering more releases.
Unfortunately with the popularity of the Spring initializer, I am afraid we have no choice but to have a UI. I do believe at least initially we need to focus on a simple UI. Certainly trying to present a “components” view of Jakarta EE is something we should prioritize lower at this time. I think it’s best to just evolve features including the UI over time. Part of the reason the project was stuck for so long is a lot of analysis paralysis around requirements and the UI. I think we should remain in a different gear now and focus a bit more on delivering working releases, even if incremental.
I do have to say that personally I believe a command line is all you need because the array of options indeed could be quite small. That’s why I would prefer we kept a mindset of being somewhat agnostic of a UI. Luckily as a side effect the IDE experience also remains nice as most IDEs have pretty good support for Maven Archetypes. It’s fairy easy to support all three pathways equally without too much work.
With regards to Gradle, I spoke with Bazlur and we feel we could easily do this without too much hassle using Maven to Gradle converters behind the scenes. The plan was to look at this once we have delivered a few more solid releases.
I should add that I am not necessarily totally against having a more minimal project generation option. What I am having trouble visualizing is what exact content is worth putting into a minimal option. Just a pom does not feel like it’s worth the effort because of the nature of Jakarta EE. Perhaps looking at what Ivo has might help. I will try to do that analysis by the end of this week. As such, adding a minimal option won’t “hurt” anything except for maybe a bit more code to maintain for us. Perhaps it can be done with a small amount of code. I’ll try to think about that once it’s a bit clearer what could be generated that makes reasonable sense.
I definitely feel strongly that a reasonably complete, working REST CRUD example is very important to have in the starter experience to increase adoption with new users for sure. There is already plenty of data points to support this need and plenty of precedent. Hopefully some of the folks that can already see that will chime in too.
Hi Ivo (and all),
Thanks, I'm also glad to see you joining this initiative. I know that it is your cup of tea from both a technical and teaching perspective, so your input is very much appreciated!
I'm still struggling with the GUI for generating Jakarta EE based projects, based on archetypes or not. It is indeed dead simple as you stated, because bootstrapping a Jakarta EE project is that simple. A Maven pom.xml file with the necessary provided Jakarta EE dependency, the required directory layout for Maven and optionally some basic files like persistence.xml and beans.xml would already be sufficient. Teaching people that this is all that's required to run on a compatible application server of their choice and which one: that's imho where the struggle is. New users often don't understand this concept ootb, and certainly not the value and benefits of this. They expect to click an interface, get a file back and be able to run it. Therefore: I get comments like:
- Jakarta EE is bad because it doesn't have a GUI like Spring or Quarkus. My option: no it doesn't because it doesn't necessarily need it other than the dead simple interface like you provided. Or the MicroProfile starter. You don't have to select components for Jakarta EE compatible projects. - Jakarta EE is bad because it doesn't have (sufficient) Gradle support. My opinion: no it doesn't because it doesn't necessarily need it other than that the exact same build artifacts are generated by a different tool.
So getting to the question of the backlog items we want to process: to what extent do we want to adhere to the user's desires via command line, GUI and tooling support? I would suggest that we create a product vision for the starter that describes what we include, and want to teach people to use the right way, the Jakarta EE way. Anything else can be explained in a FAQ or tutorials or whatever why support for certain desires is not going to be implemented.
What are your thoughts?
Edwin He Edwin,
Good to hear from you!
I can only say… I agree with your three points :-)
Laterz, Ivo.
Hi all,
I like the initiative of this separate starter project and mailing list, separated from the usual Jakarta EE mailing list discussions. I don't have all the answers to the discussions yet but would like to share my two cents to participate:
- we have users that would like to see IDE and command line usage, and we have users that want a UI to generate a project. Why not both? - using archetypes is to bootstrap a project indeed, with minimal content for a certain purpose. Generating a full fledged demo project from an archetype feels like stretching the concept, and begs the question: why? - I would advise not to overdo and overvalue the use of archetypes. Having separate ones for certain purposes (is the cut-off point a major Jakarta EE version?) feels legit, is it really that much of a burden regarding maintenance?
I'll also have a look at the content and project and see what I can come up with.
Kind regards,
Edwin I'll take a look and share my thoughts on what you have. I suspect the primary issue is the amount of generated code and the fact that you might be largely a solo effort and this effort already needing to collaborate between a number of committers and contributors. For solo efforts with very minimal archetypes the complexity that arises from code duplication and needing to maintain multiple archetypes and repositories is less of an issue. I think if you explore the current code base a bit more, you'll see why a simple change like adding a new runtime, fixing a bug or making enhancements across needlessly duplicated code would be a headache across a distributed team.
It also sounds like the command line and IDE usage as opposed to UI usage may not be a primary concern for you. The reason we went the Archetype route (which was not the original direction) is to better enable command line and IDE usage. Having fewer Archetypes to navigate makes the command line and IDE pathways easier to use and document.
One of the prime target audiences we have been putting in efforts towards is newcomers to Jakarta EE (hence start.jakarta.ee). For these sorts of folks there is definite value to a compete working but still relatively small example that showcases the power and simplicity of the platform. This is a primary use case for Archetypes (https://maven.apache.org/guides/introduction/introduction-to-archetypes.html) and there are plenty of examples of this in the Apache Archetype catalog. Certainly this is what we do for our Azure Archetypes (https://github.com/microsoft/azure-maven-archetypes) and it is very much appreciated by newcomers. That said, another use case is definitely minimal archetypes that just generate a POM. The question is whether that's a valuable model for Jakarta EE. It certainly makes clearer sense for something like Spring, Quarkus or even MicroProfile where the POM itself is not so simple to compose. With regards to the items on the issue list, they are quite dated and probably should be thought of as long term wish list items at this point rather than an actual committed roadmap. As we begin to tackle those after we work through the roadmap items there are higher levels of commitment on delivering (https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/starter#roadmap), we would certainly evolve, perhaps logically in the direction of multiple Archetypes. I think for now focusing too much on those does not make sense yet (as opposed to say creating a UI, supporting more popular runtimes or adding support for Jakarta EE 9.1). For GlassFish questions, please feel free to reach out to the GlassFish alias: https://accounts.eclipse.org/mailing-list/glassfish-dev. Most folks here are not GlassFish committers unfortunately.
On 5/2/22 3:03 PM, Ivo Woltring wrote:
The thing is I have maintained a couple of archetypes the last couple of years and I have chosen to do that in separate repositories because of the ease of use, maintaining and ease of creating new ones. My post processing script is very simple and always the same.
@Reza you asked for code...
The code for these archetypes can be found here:
And they are all presented (GUI) here:
I hope that is enough of a demonstration of giving clear names and easy code.
Why would having multiple repositories make maintaining something more difficult? I do not see that at all. If you need to change something for a specific archetype you only have to do that for that archetype right? No other archetypes needs to change. Also if you write a GUI like mine you actually have to document less as the choices you have are already clearly defined in the GUI. The GUI is dead simple because all the archetypes follow the same routine but with a different combination of tools. The telling names say it all.
So in my experience it is way easier to maintain a very simple archetype than to maintain a difficult one. The more the post processing script has to do the more difficult it will become. Taking versions / incompatibilities / different examples / etc. into account.
Right now I am creating an archetype for Glassfish 6.2.5 with JakartaEE 9.1 and Docker. That is the only thing I want in that archetype. It is almost trivial for me to make a new one based on another example I already have or update that one to the new version, but it is not as trivial for me to create a PR on the official repo and that is why I haven’t yet.
I see a lot of requests for examples in the issue list ( https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/starter/issues). The more examples you are going to put in the more exception flows (lots of if statements) you need to write if you want to jam that al into one repo. It is fantastically easy to create all those examples in separate archetypes and maintain them as they grow or need a new version.
On another note. Should a fully fletched demo be put into an archetype? If I have to remove 80% of the code every time I need to start a new project I will not use it. How about you? Should examples not be tutorials with a repo attached?
Archetypes are there to generate a specific starting point for developers right? I know I am new to this discussion but if the goal is newcomers isn’t an archetype not a strange approach? I am not trying to be difficult but I honestly don’t understand these choices. I think an archetype should help developers to start coding, not to give a demo.
BTW why do we not have official Glassfish docker images anymore?
The GitHub Actions Pipeline in the current project is already designed to test out all the current options per check-in or PR. Have you had a chance to look at that? Whatever the project structure, it would be important to have such automation in place. I would say these needs are basically the same no matter what the approach.
As I alluded to elsewhere, I personally have a hard time understanding what the value proposition would be for a very basic Archetype for Jakarta EE. Because of the nature of Jakarta EE, the essential Maven structure is always rather simple. Would it really differ very much from the Archetypes that Apache already has in the catalog? Other than the Maven project structure and POM, what other generated code would be included if any? A Servlet or JSF page? Is that really important these day? A REST endpoint? Is that really different enough from what’s there right now?
Anyway, a relatively complete code example of what would be generated would really help me understand (and probably others too). How do you think one could get that? Would it be possible to issue a draft PR? Is it already available to see? That would also help clarify the value for a possible separate Archetype (that’s what I had in mind for JSF as the generated code including the unit tests and index page would likely vary too much from the current REST CRUD example).
From: starter-dev < starter-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Ivo Woltring < ivo@xxxxxxxxx> Sent: Monday, May 2, 2022 3:07 AM To: starter developer discussions <starter-dev@eclipseorg> Subject: Re: [starter-dev] Starter archetypes / GUI / Issue #67 If you make an archetype that can do a lot of things and configure a lot then it becomes more difficult by definition. How do you test such an archetype with all its options? Generate all combinations with every change and see if it still works?
DRY is in my opinion not always the best way to go, but I see your point.
What of a compromise? A bare bones project with only the maven project and Dockerfile of choice and one with all the demo thingies and options in it. One for new blood to learn and one for those who just want a new project so they can start jamming?
Still, I am happy to actually prototype out what I had in mind so folks here can take a look and hopefully see for themselves how much not a big deal this really is.
Now, I am not saying that if the generated project varies too much in reaction to parameters that there isn’t a sensible case for creating a separate Archetype. For example, I can see a generated JSF CRUD project being sufficiently different from the current REST CRUD generated code. But fairly minor variations for Jakarta EE versions and target platform? I think that’s no big deal at all. Even the relatively simple Payara Micro Archetype handles Jakarta EE versions just fine as parameters: https://docs.payara.fish/enterprise/docs/documentation/ecosystem/maven-archetype.html.
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