Why JHipster?

If you are wondering why you should be using JHipster, then just imagine the following scenario. You are tasked to build a web application, let us say a blog with an Angular frontend and a Java backend, with features for users to create blog posts and be able to display blog posts based on user permissions. You are also asked to build administrative modules such as user management, monitoring, and so on. Finally, you have to test and deploy the application to a cloud service.

If you are approaching this challenge the traditional way you will most probably be doing the following steps. Let's skip the details for simplicity. So, the steps would be as follows:

1. Design an architecture stack and decide on various libraries to use (let's say you choose Spring Framework for the backend, with Spring Security and Spring MVC)
2. Create an application base with all the technologies wired together (for example, you will have to make sure the authentication flow between the Angular client side and Spring Security is wired properly)
3. Write a build system for the application (let's say you used webpack to build the Angular client side and Gradle to build the server side)
4. Write integration tests and unit tests for the base
5. Create administrative modules
6. Design business entities and create them with the Angular client side and Java server side with test coverage
7. Write all the business logic, test the application, and deploy it

While this approach definitely works, for this simple application you would have spent anywhere between four to six weeks depending on the team size. Now, more than 70% of the effort would have been spent on writing boilerplate code and making sure all the libraries work well together. Now, would you believe me if I say that you could develop, test, and deploy this application in less than 30 minutes using JHipster? Yes, you can, while still getting high-quality production grade code with lots of extra bells and whistles. We will see this in action in our next chapter where we will build a real-world application using JHipster.