I mess with a lot of things. Well, a lot of programming languages, libraries, apps, etc. Basically, if it something to do with computer, I will try to or eventually try to play with it. Since I don’t have a lot of time, with a day job and trying to fool around with some may things, I do have to pick my battles. Sometimes, I am lucky, and other times not.
Recently, I landed on JHipster. It is a tool, specifically an opinionated stack of applications for creating Single-Page-Applications (SPA) web applications using AngularJS for the client-side and Spring boot (and friends) for the backend.
Nothing in the stack is really new to me. The entire things is bundled up in a nice Yeoman generator called ‘jhipster’. And it uses Node, NPM, Gulp on Node, and of course AngualrJS and Spring to name a few. All of these I have used in my own pet projects and even launch an AngularJS take over at my last job. We had a web app to re-write and there was noway I was going to do it again without some kind of framework. I like AngularJS personally, and people are free to disagree or bicker about the choice. But we need something to help organize the code.
Anyway, back to my new friend. Well, a new friend with all the familiar attributes and characteristics I liked in some other friends. I should really call this jHipster my super-friend.
jHipster take a lot of the tedium you would have to do in any decent modern web app with a db (either SQL or NoSQL) backend, security, monitoring, etc. Really, when you want to write an app, you have your billion dollar idea. You can either spend time doing what you have done before or everyone else have done, the drudge work. Or you can pick up jHipster or something like it, and get to solving your problem.
Now, jHipster is no silver bullet. You will still have to spend some time to learn it. Fortunately, if you read the documentation on their website, you should be through it in about an hour or two and be good to go. Again, depending on your level of familiarity with some of the other technologies in the stack. The you know about the other pieces in the stack, the easier it is to put the jHipster image together.
I have played with many such app stack, like MeteorJS, Deployd, Hapi, Express, and MEAN. I might even have forgotten a stack or two there too. Either way, they all have their strengths and weaknesses.  jHipster is fairly new to the scene, so it is benefiting from fresh smell and fixing a few pain points with some of the earlier ones. But I am sure it is not the last or will it fix everything. The trajectory so far however, is looking really good. It really just what you would have done had you had to write a decent web app using AngularJS and Spring technologies.