According to the author Thomas Mann, “A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”. And, working as a tech-lead, I found myself turning into someone for whom writing Java was more difficult than for other people. When a piece of software might need supporting for years there are a lot of things to consider.

One of the attractions of Spring Boot is that  it offers a way to get sites live very quickly. In practise, a production environment offers so many potential issues that a Spring Boot deployment still requires a significant amount of work. A simple hobby site… should, in theory, be very quick.

So, I’m going to try to put a Spring Boot site live and see how long it takes. The site will be simple – a map of Brighton where users can add points of interest. I’m going to use heroku to simplify deployment and cobble together some Javascript.

I’m not racing to get this live, but taking this at a leisurely pace – and the hours won’t be contiguous. Let’s see how it goes.

Hour 1

• Set up a new git repo.
• 0c7b180 – Created a basic Spring Boot project, using Accessing JPA Data with REST as a template. Rather than storing Person objects, I used PlaceOfInterest objects. Within 15 minutes I could write and read from an in-memory JPA datastore.
• 2efcede Added some static pages to the Spring Application, which I had lying around already.
• 1cad492 Next was setting up Heroku (which meant retrieving an ancient login). The free service should suffice for the basics. Heroku have a guide to deploying Spring Boot applications. This didn’t mention the Procfile, which is described in a post by Nicholas Paul Smith.  Testing the app through curl, it is persisting data, albeit to an in-memory database.

So, in the first hour, I have a Spring Boot project running on heroku. The next step is to add a persistent postgres database.

Hour 2

Hour 2 was spent in Emporium Cafe, struggling to connect the Spring Boot application through hibernate to a local PSQL database. Since I was trying to do things fast, this was something of a hack-and-slash effort – for example, resorting to creating a hibernate_sequence object manually. Setting up postgres was a bit of a drag as I’m used to MySQL.

The database URL was passed via a JDBC_URL environment variable as I’ll need this for Heroku. At the end of the hour I had a local application writing to the postgres database. The next session will start with tidying up the source code that was added and committing it.

• 179356f – Added a basic SQL file. This was generated by Hibernate with the addition of a sequence. This needs to be tidied up.

Hour 3 (and a bit)

• 30b5346 Starting by committing the database work from the day before
• 4fdc2c7 Added a new file to keep track of what needs doing for this site.
• 2a217b0 I added a new layer to the map, which loaded in a tab-separated data from a new controller. We’re using Openlayers 2 for expediency, as this simple format is not available in Openlayers 3.  This was a rather frustrating process: the markers were not displaying but there was no error. This commit has a single marker appearing about 400 miles South of Ghana.

The next session will start with working out why Openlayers is not displaying the marker where I expected,  in Sussex, England. This was annoying enough to keep me looking into it for another 15 minutes, so hour 3 was a little longer than planned. As usual with mapping bugs, the problem is not setting the projection.

Hour 4

A slightly shorter hour, to make up for overrunning the previous night.

• ba69d68 Added the projection to the POI layer, and generated the TSV file from the database. This means that the markers on the map are now connected to Postgres.
• 74b718d Set the app up on Heroku – which required changing the database url value; and, for some reason, having to reinstall  some heroku command line plugins, which slowed things down. I also had to add database objects  to the external database.
• 1a436bc Cosmetic changes, including a title for the page and removing the default favicon – although this is still appearing for some reason.

At the end of the fourth hour, I have a site running on a remote server that can read/update a database to display locations. Given my slowness setting up postgres and fixing the Openlayers issue, it looks like a basic CRUD site could be put live in a couple of hours. Next up: adding a form to the page for new data.

Hour 5

At this point, I’m into playing with Javascript, setting up a form to submit data. Clicking on the map now updates a form, and submitting the form adds entries to the database. It’s a little clunky – the new object doesn’t appear on the map without refreshing; the form looks ugly; and there is an error handler firing on the AJAX request. A slightly slow hour, getting to grips with Javascript, but the main user-facing functionality is now there.

• 4452c5d Added a form to the site so that new places-of-interest can be submitted.

To Be Continued?

There are a few obvious things to do next. The TSV file should only show visible points, the page needs tidying and I’d like to use a proper domain in place of the Heroku-supplied one. I’m very pleased with the speed and simplicity of progress so far.