Building a side project is an excellent way to try out some new technology. On the other hand: it’s also nice to actually make some progress on the ideas in your head. That’s why I tend to lean on my current expertise and do some exploration from there.
Quarkus for backend
In the past I’ve worked a lot with Java Enterprise Edition, so I’m very familiar with stuff like Jax-RS and the Dependency Injection library CDI. Nowadays we don’t want to run our application in a complex Application Server, but just run it as a standalone jar. The most popular application framework to use for this is Spring Boot, but I also want to try something different. Quarkus is comparable to Spring Boot, but it’s based on the Java Enterprise standards. I’ve worked a couple of hours with it now and my first impression is very positive. It leverages the components I already know and provides a very nice developer experience.
Some examples:
- a CLI to create the initial project
- a lot of extensions which you can setup through the cli. All dependencies and other configs are automatically provisioned for you.
- a default database setup (for development) without needing additional config of the actual database.
Svelte for frontend
I’m not a frontend expert, but it’s good to have experience with some different tools and techniques nonetheless. Eventually we all need some gui to interact with our system. For the project I’m working on now I choose to use Svelte. The thing I like about it is the way that components are created. It’s pretty easy to keep things nice and tidy, so I’m pretty happy so far. Angular is another framework that I’ve used in the past. I’m quite curious how it’s been growing over the last couple of years…