React - First Impressions

I've been using React for a personal project, and I am delighted to say that I overall enjoy using it! While I don't think I'll ever be a strong front end developer (I am much stronger in and really prefer backend development), it is nice to know that I have some front end chops that won't leave me unhappy.

Working with React feels very natural to me. Creating stateful components that are then composed with props and JSX is very similar to creating stateful objects in java, and the main thing to know is that we are extending a Component, and we are overriding render() and other related methods in order to show components the way we want to show them. The other lifecycle methods get a little tricky here and there, but everything seems to be well documented, and there is tons of community support for problems.

I haven't quite built something so sophisticated that it needs a separate state management module yet (read: redux). I don't think I will go that direction next anyway.

Now that I have some practice with front end work, I think my next step will better understand Typescript, which I can hopefully incorporate into React for future work.

Comments

JHipster, Liquibase, MySQL, and initializing data, including booleans!

When generating a data model from JHipster JDL, we will often declare entities with Boolean fields. I have so far abandoned H2 as a database because of liquibase issues, and both my dev and production databases will be MySQL. This is relevant to the Boolean field desire there is a long history in software development of how to store Boolean data types in a SQL database whose standards classically do not support Boolean. In the current JHipster/Liquibase incarnation, tables in MySQL are generated for us, which is really nice. The Boolean data types are stored as BIT (1). This is not a problem so far -- most developers seem to agree now that as a best practice, we should store values in databases as false = 0 and true = 1, and a BIT(1) is a great, simple way to do that. An issue arises when we try to use liquibase to set/update our database to the desired starting state. For my project, I've chosen gradle instead of maven as a build tool, and gradle has a plugin for liquiba

Deploying Spring Boot talking to MySQL on AWS

In a recent post, I listed some very basic information about running a MySQL database on AWS. In most cases, we don't want a database alone; we want an application that uses that database for CRUD. I've created a simple Spring Boot application that exposes a REST API to create and manage lists of things. The list values are all stored in a MySQL database. When I went to deploy the application on AWS using Elastic Beanstalk, there were some really good, automatic things that happened to make my life easy: AWS can deploy a Spring Boot jar very easily by simply uploading the jar during setup. AWS creates security groups on the fly so I don't have to worry about extra security configuration. AWS automatically generates DNS information and provides me a URL for accessing the application. As I deployed the application and saw all of these things, I was pretty excited. It is nice to have a lot of this stuff taken care of for me. Then, I tried to test my applica

Spring Security - Authority vs Role

I have spent a lot of time recently trying to understand the difference between Authority and Role in Spring Security. This is a brief review of what I found. When creating a UserDetailsService or overriding configure(AuthenticationManagerBuilder auth) in the security config class that extends WebSecurityConfigurerAdapter, I basically get complete control over what I populate inside of the UserDetails that is used/returned. This is important because the UserDetails interface really only cares about how to return one thing: Collection<? extends GrantedAuthority> getAuthorities(); A GrantedAuthority just seems like a glorified String wrapper that names some thing. The question is... what is that thing? This is where the subtle difference between Authority and Role comes into play. I think that Role is an older thought/construct that automatically gets plugged into Authority if we just create a user with a Role. But completely forget about the code and classes for a mi

Hello World: Software Development

Search This Blog