softmentor / angularjs-dropwizard-example

General info

This is a little example application that I have used to learn to use the AngularJS and Dropwizard frameworks. It also serves as a project template that can be used to get a new project up and running quickly. A blog article describing what I did can be found here: Getting Started With AngularJS, Jetty and Dropwizard

Architecture information

AngularJS is used to create a simple webapp (angularjs-webapp module), while Dropwizard has been used to create a backend server with RESTful services (dw-server module). The two are deployed on different web servers, as shown here:

Topics that have been explored

AngularJS

• organizing an AngularJS webapp in modules and partials
• AngularJS directives, filters, calling backend services via $resource, etc.
• using Bootstrap with AngularJS
• using $promise returned from $resource calls to ensure that certains functions are executed in sequence

Jetty

• using Jetty for both the webapp and the backend services
• embedding Jetty in the application in dw-server so that it is very easy to run and debug from the IDE.
• configuring Jetty in the angular-webapp as a proxy to the dw-server in order to tackle the issue that a JavaScript application is not allowed to call back to another server than it's origination server.

Dropwizard

• creating RESTful (JSON) services with Jersey & Jackson, including health checks
• getting the services to handle requests from AngularJS $resource
• creating persistence logic with JDBI

Maven

• using the the appassembler-maven-plugin to generate a script that will set the classpath and run the webapp
• building fat JARS with Maven Shade Plugin making it possible to deploy Dropwizard services as single .jar files.

Gradle

• For those with allergies towards xml bloat, there is a gradle (almost) equivalent build.

Running the app with gradle

1. Start the dwServer $projectRoot:> ./gradlew runDwServer
2. Start the webApp $projectRoot:> ./gradlew jettyMrun

First time you run ./gradlew it will download a gradle distribution, not install neeeded.