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Re: [starter-dev] Some updates on the progress made lately
Hi, all,

It's great to see so much activity on the Starter project.

I like the approach the Starter project did initially, to get things started and simple - just generate a maven command line to execute. It was at the time when the Started project didn't have many contributors. And using maven archetypes is a good starting point.

But my vision for Starter resonates with other ideas mentioned in this thread:
  • It would be good to provide an option to download a ZIP file generated from the archetype
  • Provide example projects, or even make it possible to generate an example project by selecting the components that users are interested in (e.g. they select REST and CDI, and the generated project would create a REST service with a bean injected to it beans.xml file, and a corresponding README that describes how to build it and how the components are wired)
On top of that, I'd like to see a REST endpoint in Starter, so that ZIP file or Maven command line can be generated with a script or REST client that connects to the endpoint. This would allow writing a Starter CLI or IDE plugins, which would use the Starter webapp as the backend.

A few years ago, I started writing a Java app, that generates a ZIP file from any Maven archetype and I think it would nicely fit what is already in the Starter webapp. I'll check what's the state of this app and will try to contribute it to the Starter, so that we can generate ZIP files for download based on the archetypes.

Ondro

On Sat, Nov 12, 2022 at 3:11 AM A N M Bazlur Rahman <bazlur@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello everyone,

I am thrilled to be a part of this initiative and grateful to everyone who nominated/voted for me to be a committer.

I love what you have all said so far. I don’t necessarily disagree with any of Ivar’s points, but let me share my thoughts about it.
 
I work with junior developers so that I can see things from their perspective. We're all experienced developers here, so we don't have any trouble understanding and working through a low level of complexity. Everyone here knows the maven archetype like the back of their hand. But if we want to get new or less experienced developers to try out the Jakarta EE spec, I think it's a good way to stop them. There are already a lot of good alternatives that are pretty easy to use. One example is the spring boot starter. I can go to the website, download the project, and try it out even though I don't know anything about it.

If you already know about Maven and the Maven archetype, I don't think you need this starter project. You can use GitHub to find a sample project and start working on it.

From this point of view, I think the second option Ivar mentioned in the email is the best one.

So, essentially what I'm saying is:–
Let's make a website where we hide all the archetype stuff and let the user download a fully working sample along with a convenient runtime. The idea is that the user will download and run the sample, then hit the browser.

Since this is one of the major open-source projects I’m contributing to, I can assure my commitment.

Thank you,

-Bazlur

On Fri, Nov 11, 2022 at 11:49 AM Ralph Soika <ralph.soika@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi all,
I followed this project and the discussion in the last view weeks. I also agree that this idea of a starter page is really great. And it's important to give new developers (who haven't been using Java EE for the last 10 years) a starting point.

For us here, everything that is on the starter page is completely clear and the "The Jakarta® EE Tutorial" explains the rest. But what I observe is that many new developers have absolutely no patience anymore. So I think it would be good to offer not only a selection of platforms, but also a small selection of minimalist project templates. For example, a simple RestAPI example with a Swagger UI or a minimal JPA example.  Some time ago I had assembled something like this for a customer in a draft version including a Dockerfile to provide a simple start with a default runtime:

https://github.com/rsoika/ralphs-microservices

The goal was to show that Jakarta EE brings a lot of additional functionality if you combine it for example with Eclipse Microprofile. I don't know what you think about a Dockerfiles with a Wildfly or Payara Runtime? Or whether you consider Eclipse Microprofiles to be overloaded here?

But I think that at least we should somehow give the profile/template selection a dynamically reloaded README.md file that explains a bit what the template consists of. It may be enough to point the developer to the corresponding sections in the "The Jakarta® EE Tutorial".

For example:

This example contains a Rest Service called '/hello' which is defined in the class RestResource. You can add additional GET, POST and DELETE resources. Find out more about the Jakarta EE Rest API here.

If you want to load or store your data from a Database you can use the Jakarat EE Persistence API.

I know you think this is idiotic, but for many new developers these very simple hints are important to survive the first half hour ;-)


===
Ralph

Am 11.11.22 um 08:22 schrieb Ivar Grimstad:
Greetings Committers and Contributors,

I am super excited to see the starter project moving forward after a little standstill. There has been some great progress made lately! New contributors and committers are on board. We now have a simple UI available at https://start.jakarta.ee that generates a simple project for Jakarta EE 8, Jakarta EE 9.1, and Jakarta EE 10. The feedback I have received from the community when demoing it has been 100% positive.

The UI uses bare-minimum archetypes to generate the code. The next steps would be to add support for runtimes and possibly explore creating a CLI as an alternative to the Web UI.

In addition to the UI, there are also several archetypes that generate more extensive examples being worked on. Since everything is based on archetypes, adding these and potentially other archetypes created by the community should be fairly straightforward.

The archetypes for EE 8, 9.1, and 10 could be mashed together as one with the conditional logic inside the archetype. I am not sure if this is the right thing to do, though. 
Keep in mind that as we go forward with EE 11, 12, 13, ... the older versions won't need much attention. Sometimes, a little duplication is favorable over adding another branch in the logic (even if it is just another if-statement...).

The option of creating a server-based solution to generate the starter projects is still an option if someone wants to pursue this. It is always good to have options.
Personally, I think the approach to base the starter on archetypes is a better and more flexible way to go. The only server needed is Maven Central, and that is already there and not our problem to maintain. And it provides the option for developers to consume the archetypes directly, via our UI, potentially a CLI, or directly in IDEs.

Ivar
--

Ivar Grimstad

Jakarta EE Developer Advocate | Eclipse Foundation Eclipse Foundation - Community. Code. Collaboration. 


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