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

[Ivo Woltring <ivo@xxxxxxxxx>]

Greetings!

I am in total agreement with your mail Ivar.

When I generate a Jakarta EE project I want a minimal version most of the time. I use them a lot.

When we move to newer versions of Jakarta EE the older archetypes  are just there for those that still need it but they do not need further maintenance. When you add all into one archetype you add complexity with every version / server etc you want to support. 

I think it is much better to maintain specialised archetypes for the duration of a version and leave them behind when a newer versions comes along. Time to focus on the newer version. This leaves clean archetypes with no added complexity. 

As the pom.xml for Jakarta EE projects are often much simpelere than e.g. spring-boot it should be enough to have a couple of archetypes and support community archetypes.

I am very interested in the cli idea :-)

Kind regards,

Ivo.

On 11 Nov 2022, at 08:22, Ivar Grimstad <ivar.grimstad@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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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