Question

I was wondering if there is an off the shelf tool to help create a ‘web application’ directory structure with a basic application up and running? The source code would already be pre-written I’m guessing or based on the options some files may/may-not be generated.

I’m not sure what you’d call it but say we have a custom framework* which are to be used for web application development – rather than ‘creating’ a directory structure all the time we could just create it once and have a console like interface similar to the play framework to generate a basic application or an empty one as per the developer’s choice.

We could just give various types of ‘zip’ files and ask folks to unzip it and import it in their IDE of choice and continue. However, we’d prefer to have an ‘installable’ to run from the command line (or GUI but no such preference) to have a basic application up and running without everyone wanting to do it all over again.

How does the Play framework do it? What do they use? (I’m guess similar things exist for RoR, Groovy/Grails.)

*It’s not custom per se, but similar to having all the spring/hibernate/restlet/freemarker etc files pre-configured, up and running and a directory structure with packages for the various components by convention

Answer 1

I think one of the key points here regarding the Play framework is that it uses the concept of convention over configuration. Your applications are forced to follow the same pattern for the different parts of your application, or it will not work. I personally like this because it makes working on different projects easier, as the rules are always the same, rather the somewhat unwritten rules of best practice.

Java EE on the other hand takes the concept of configuration over convention. Therefore all your files and structures are defined in your relevant XML documents that specify your frameworks, classpaths, etc. There do exist some tools to try to bridge the gap. For example

• IDE’s will have project creation tools for your chosen framework, so will create a Struts or Spring MVC project structure with a few simple wizard steps. Eclipse does this for sure as one example.
• Spring MVC also has Roo. This is a boilerplate code generation tool that creates large parts of your initial project for you.

From your description it seems you have a few different frameworks that you want to have auto-generated, but I don’t think any tool currently will serve your purpose. Your concept of a zip file is your best bet here.