When developing an application, one of the most annoying and time-consuming parts is recompiling the code and restarting the servers to see the code changes we have made. Traditionally, JavaScript code used to be easier, as it didn't need any compilation and you could just refresh the browser and see the changes. However, even though current MVVM stacks make the client side more important than before, they also introduce side effects, such as transpiling of client-side code, and more. So, if you are refactoring a field for an entity, you would traditionally need to do the following tasks to see the changes in your browser:
- Compile the server-side Java code.
- Apply the table changes to the database.
- Recompile the client-side code.
- Restart the application server.
- Refresh the browser.
This takes a lot of time, is frustrating to do for every small change, and results in you making more changes before checking them, hence affecting productivity.
What if I told you that you don't have to do any of these, and all of this could happen automatically as you save your changes using your IDE? That would be awesome, wouldn't it?
With JHipster you get exactly that. JHipster uses Spring Boot DevTools, webpack dev server, and BrowserSync to enable a nice live reload feature for the end-to-end code.
Let's take a quick look at the technologies used.