Progress, Slowly

There is this app I have been working on for some time, well. I am not sure if it the same app.

Let me put is this way. If you are building a house, but before you can finish. You tear it down, and start over. Possibly with different contractors and different materials especially. Otherwise, it would be really silly to be doing it the same house design, with the same material, if all you changed was the workers every time you started over.

Well, I am kind of in that boat. The look of the app hasn’t really evolved over the months since I conceived and started working on it. There are visual changes to be sure, but those are more like whether it was the mobile or the desktop version. Not so much between desktop versions.

What I found myself doing, is starting over a lot. I would get to a certain point, and stall. Basically, the technology I would be using for my backend, would have some hole that slowed me down. For example, I started out using Java backend based on Spring Framework. I have used Spring a number of times and I love it. But as I worked on my app, I was getting tired of spending time on house keeping. Like if I had an entity, I had to do a lot of work to protect it. I couldn’t just add and entity, and move on to make forms and services to use it. I had to say, well, how do I secure it and expose it appropriately.

That began to get to me and I felt like I needed a web stack that would do most of that lifting. Something that would free me up to work on the core features of the app. Instead of all that side stuff the app required but wasn’t really part of the problem I wanted to solve. that other stuff, user management, security, etc., that wasn’t part of what I had conceived. That just got bolted on as requirements for a modern web app.

Anyway, after many restarts, I am not once again pretty happy with where I am on how it is going. I finally landed on a framework stack that has taken away all that those keeping grunt work. JHipster is my new buddy. It is really filling the gap where MeteorJS, Angular + BaasBox, or Angular + Spring, or Ionic + BaasBox, or Ionic + Spring couldn’t fill.

The funny thing is, JHipster is Angular + Spring and then some. It is just that it has so many other things, that I don’t need to worry about security. That is taken care of. I don’t have to worry about metrics, that is taken care of too.  And the list just goes on.

The only thing slowing me down now is having time to work on it. Because, with a full work day and other things too do, there just isn’t enough hours in a day to get every thing I want to do, done.

In a few weeks, I might revisit just how JHipster is helping or not helping my project.

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