Feedback on JHipster Lite

[Julien Dubois]

Hi everyone,

This is mostly for people working on JHipster Lite. Please feel free to comment/discuss.

As I’m preparing for Devoxx and the Paris Java User Group, I’m starting my usual demo for JHipster. I obviously know more than the usual user, but here I’m doing this as a “normal JHipster user” would react when seeing JHipster Lite for the first time.

I’m limiting this on purpose on the current features -> as discussed many times, I believe we need to have JDL support before this can really take off.

• I’m running JHipster Lite locally
• That’s pretty cool, and better than the command line for complex operations. Of course we’ll need an easier to use UI, but for me that’s already super good.
• The decision tree between modules is CRAZY IMPRESSIVE.
• We’ll need to upgrade to Spring Boot 3 at the end of the month: the next milestone they will release should be better than Spring Boot 2 + Spring Native (I have insider information).
• Startup time is a bit slow, I really wonder why, as there isn’t any database access
• Why are we using port 7471? We should use 1337 as we are super cool hipsters.
• Using the UI
• It’s not clear to me in the UI if I need to go step by step, or if I can directly use “Spring Boot Tomcat” and have all the intermediary steps selected automatically (I know it does, it’s just not graphical in the UI)
• We need to have the default values (or random ones) selected by default. Otherwise we have alerts when we just select a box and just want to have a look. For example, we can have the server port at 8080 by default, no need to force the person to write this.
• I LOVE that we commit between each step. For the online version, we should be able to do PRs, that will be great. And I know I do un-natural things here, but I use https://gitup.co and I can remove the steps (it can delete commits), which I find super cool to test things.
• We really need “module packs”, where people can automatically have some common type of application. Like Spring Boot + Hibernate, and everything that is needed in-between.
• The generated app
• I HATE that we don’t have the default errors anymore. Having the default “Whitelabel Error Page” sucks (like it sucks for Spring Boot). Nobody understands this at first, and we can use this page to add documentation: on JHipster it’s here to guide people when they mess up at first.
• It also seems to me that we miss all our default errors for API, as described at https://www.jhipster.tech/managing-server-errors/#error-pages - those are super popular and super useful
• The Spring Boot dev tools do not work by default anymore. We’re not having the old dev/prod modes, which is useful most of the times (I agree, not always). Anyway, I want to have hot reload by default, especially when I build my app: I want to apply new modules, and see my app automatically update (it won’t work if the Maven pom is updated, but it should still be cool quite often).
• For vue.js: if you run it with Maven, hot reload also doesn’t work. I’m not too surprised, but this should be documented. Then running it with npm directly this works crazy well: I don’t even have to save my file, what kind of magic is this?
• The hexagonal architecture is VERY confusing to me. I know I’m old and grumpy, but I guess it will be confusing for most junior developers. Are we sure we want to go that way? If yes, we need a lot more documentation.

Julien

[Pascal GRIMAUD]

Hello Julien,

Here quick answers from Colin (not from me):

* For the UI some changes waiting here: https://github.com/jhipster/jhipster-lite/pull/3433 (hopefully for the best...);
* For module pack there was this idea: https://github.com/jhipster/jhipster-lite/issues/2907 but not much love for now (considering the work it requires...);
* For the default error is it the 'zalando-problems' module or something else (I can't say, cc @Pascal);
* The vue module needs a total rework, can't evolve as it is now, it is one of the many modules that needs a rework :);
* For the architecture I don't understand the concern, every team can pick the architecture they like, JHipster doesn't enforce that (unless you use the bad named 'java-archunit' module). I can think of many applications currently in production that were bootstrapped with generator JHipster and using hexagonal architecture. To be honest, the Hexagonal architecture really is nothing! You can see that as an MVC with just a dependency inversion to talk to the infrastructure. In my experience this architecture is not challenging (building the domain using DDD is);

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