Facilitate generation of Javalin starter code

[zugazagoitia]

As discussed in Discord we should provide a better distribution example/documentation/tool than we currently do in our hello-world tutorials, they let the user run but not package/deploy the application.

Options considered:

• Something similar to spring start (but 100% client sided)
• CLI tool for scaffolding
• Repo templates with automation (see JetBrains Example)

Many reported issues come from an incorrect distribution and this could help.

[dzikoysk]

It might be also worth to mention, that we could probably record users' choices to gather some interesting metrics about current users (most likely newcomers).

[dzikoysk]

Kotlin team created something similar for KMP in latest release:

• https://kmp.jetbrains.com/

And Ktor seems to have it for a while too:

• https://start.ktor.io/

[tipsy]

I will have a lot of free time in December, so I could have a look at it then.

[zugazagoitia]

Also some sources:

• kmp-web-wizard
• ktor-init-tools

[HaydenMeloche]

another reference would be the quarkus cli
https://quarkus.io/guides/cli-tooling

it does a lot but has the ability to create projects from scratch.

I would be interested in contributing to this as well.

[jbuhacoff]

How does "facilitate distribution of javalin applications" correspond to a generator that lets you configure & download a new project to work on? Please consider renaming the issue to "facilitate generation of Javalin starter code" or something like that.

[tipsy]

Changed!

[zugazagoitia]

How does "facilitate distribution of javalin applications" correspond to a generator that lets you configure & download a new project to work on? Please consider renaming the issue to "facilitate generation of Javalin starter code" or something like that.

This issue started because we wanted to provide a "default" option for people to package Javalin applications without improperly shading JARs, which causes problems for many people due to Jetty's runtime loading of classes.

[jbuhacoff]

I get it. My comment is merely that what the tool actually does is provide starter code, not distribute the app to where it will be installed. The tool will be a great addition though.