Last Updated on July 10, 2024

JHipster is a free and open-source application generator used to quickly develop modern web applications and microservices. 

It provides a powerful toolkit that streamlines the initial setup and development process, allowing you to focus on the core functionality of your application.

Code Generation

It allows you to choose from various popular frontend technologies like Angular, React, and Vue.js, while also offering backend options with Spring Boot (Java or Kotlin), Micronaut, Quarkus, Node.js, and .NET.

JHipster also embraces cloud-native principles with Docker and Kubernetes integration, facilitating deployment to various cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

It builds your application into a single executable JAR file. This allows you to run your application on any server that supports Java.
The full list of technologies that Jhispter implements can be found on the official website.

Rapid Prototyping

JHipster embraces cloud-native principles with Docker and Kubernetes integration, facilitating deployment to various cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.

It automates a significant portion of the initial code setup, generating essential components like entities, controllers, and services. This saves developers time and ensures a consistent code structure.

JHipster offers built-in tools for testing, database management, and code formatting, further streamlining the development experience.

Offers generators for deploying to specific cloud platforms like Heroku and Azure. Additionally, the JDL (JHipster Domain Language) allows you to configure deployments to other environments with some manual configuration.

JDL

JHipster Domain Language is a specific way to describe the structure of your application using a human-readable syntax.

JDL allows you to declare what you want in your application rather than writing code to achieve it. This simplifies configuration and makes it easier to understand the overall structure of your application.

Installing JHipster

To be able to install JHipster, we need to have installed one of the Long Term Support versions of Java (at least 11) and NodeJS in our system.

In our system we have LTS versions 21 and 20.25.1 of Java and NodeJS

We use NPM package manager for installation

npm install -g generator-jhipster

JHipster Spring Boot Example

We create a new directory and run jhipster command inside:

mkdir JHipsterProject
cd JHipsterProject
jhipster

The generator poses several questions such as:

Do we want to use Maven or Gradle for building, What king of authentication we want to use, Which front end framework we want to use (Angular, React…), Which Database (Mongo, MySQL…), Do we want to use caching etc.

To create an application tailored to our needs.

If we chose Maven as build tool, we start the application by running following command:

$ ./mvnw

By typing into the browser: localhost:8080 and we see the first generated app!

Finally, we can explore the website, check the authentication/registration process, and examine monitoring data.

This login page gives information about JHipster Application. You can log in with the default username “admin” and password “admin”.

Under the Administration tab we can check health of the application

JHipster provides basic metrics information (JVM, Garbage Collection)