Conference Report: JHipster Code 2020

What, When, Where?

Yep: The JHipster team did indeed hold an in-person conference in a year of a worldwide pandemic and remote conferences. I’m talking about “JHipster Code 20202”, the annual JHipster conference. It took place in Bordeaux, France, on September 14, 2020. I didn’t take part.

The other thing that was different this year: It was all about coding. Last year, we had 18 talks (9 in English and 9 in French) after the keynote. This year, I think it was one. And who was coding? From the looks of it, the JHipster core team.

The Big Picture

Here are the “big rocks” I gathered from the keynote (see below for the videos):

• JHipster goes beyond Spring Boot & Java: JHipster has plugins, called blueprints. Kotlin is the most popular Java alternative language on the JVM. It already has a stable blueprint. Now Blueprints for the Spring Boot alternatives Quarkus and Micronaut are in development. But JHipster even supports JVM competitors Node.js and .NET Core through stable blueprints.
• Vue.js moves into the core: Vue.js moves from a blueprint into the JHipster core, joining Angular and React. So soon, JHipster will support all the “Big three web frameworks” out of the box.
• JHipster 7: The current version JHipster 6.10.x is probably the last main release on the 6.x branch. The next major release will be JHipster 7. You can follow its progress on this Github project page.
• Spring Boot 2.3 in JHipster 7: Spring Boot 2.3 came out in the middle of May. JHipster 7 will support it. The next version of Spring Boot, 2.4, is scheduled for release in seven weeks on November 12, 2020. So either JHipster version 7 is due soon, or Spring Boot 2.4 support will take some time.
• Java 11 and PostgreSQL as defaults: This indicates increasing acceptance of the current Java LTS version and the fiercest MySQL competitor.
• Few JDL Changes: Last year, the roadmap contained many JDL improvements. I think custom annotations is the only one that made it. That’s too bad.

Anything Else Interesting?

• JDL Studio V2: We express our data model with the JHipster Domain Language (JDL). The JDL application is rewritten in React and Redux. It will also be better (entity grouping, better relationship visualization, more control over style) and faster.
• JHipster Control Center: This is a new, separate application manages JHipster microservices. It’s written in Vue.js.
• End-to-end web tests with Cypress: They’ll migrate from Protractor. Cypress is simpler and better and can also run unit tests.
• More Plugin improvements: Blueprints for the Svelte web framework, JPA alternative Jooq and the Go language are in development or planned.
• Hexagonal Architecture: This architectural style is also called “ports and adapters”. It promotes loose coupling. It may come to JHipster. There’s some confusion about this because the issue tracking it is about Domain-Driven Design.
• Angular CLI support planned: JHipster currently builds Angular with Webpack. The plan is to switch to the Angular CLI.

What Were the Talks?

The Keynote is on YouTube. The part about what’s next starts at 10 minutes and 18 seconds:

Currently, I could only find one more presentation from that conference on YouTube. It was about JHipster security. Echo makes the first few minutes hard to understand, but it’s fine after 3 minutes and 22 seconds.