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First thoughts on working with JHipster

I'm working through a sample application with JHipster, and so far, I like it.  The approach and instructions seem straight forward, and the ability to generate domain objects and associated code using jdl is nice.  I've also looked at generating the domain objects for different kinds of databases, and the results are intriguing.  When generating code for mysql (a relational database), we see lombok doing a lot of work to generate boilerplate.  This is not the case if we generate code for mongo (a document-oriented no-sql database).  For mongo, JHipster manually generates getters, setters, equals, hashcode, and even some other builder-type methods.  The important thing here for me is not so much the use of various tools, but more the basic fact that the resulting generated code is fundamentally different.

I tend to work in Windows most of the time, and this has become a problem for trying to run databases and other useful tools/images in docker.  I have Windows 10, but not the Pro edition (maybe I should just spring for it?), and docker does not work unless you have the Pro edition.  I've noticed that there is now built-in access to bash for windows, so I am considering that as an option for trying to get docker installed on Windows.  Until then, I'm running all of my docker images on my mbp, and I'm just connecting the dev deployed Windows builds to the databases running on the mbp to keep going so that I don't get bogged down.

JHipster generates application.yml files (both dev and prod!) for spring boot, and IntelliJ easily finds and helps auto-complete changes to the spring.data.mongodb properties necessary to connect to the docker images on my mbp, which is very nice.

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