jug.bg 3.0 workshop (part 1)

The current version of our website (the one you are looking at the moment) is developed using WordPress. While it is one of the best CMS-es out there and even though that the this site was implemented by the best professionals in our country (and they did it for free! kudos!), we’d like to take the challenge an produce a new version of it, [almost] completely using the Java stack.
Thus we will achieve the following:

  • Be able to easily extend it by adding new functionality without bothering the experts or browse long hours stackoverflow.com
  • Give an opportunity to even our junior members to participate in starting a new greenfield project and seeing it go to production
  • Proudly wear the  “JUG powered by Java” badge

When: 26th April, 19:30
Where: Hack Bulgaria (Sofia, Resen Str.)

The plan:

1) Visiting the technology stack and picking between the implementations where possible

Here the choice will be of the whole team. The only thing that we have “chosen” for you is Java EE (on top of TomEE), the database (MySQL) and the frontend template theme.

“Why Java EE and not Spring?” someone would ask. Because we already have a spring website: the one of our community conference jPrime, where there is still ongoing development and whoever wants can pick a task or even create one and create a pull request. For the JUG website we’d like to pick something else and Java EE was the obvious choice as most of us don’t have much experience with Grails, Play! or other JVM web frameworks.

After a short presentation of the different possibilities, we’ll describe what we believe arethe best options currently and we will ask you for feedback to choose the JPA provider (OpenJPA, Hibernate or EclipseLink), the service layer (CDI + DeltaSpike or EJB), MVC technology (JSF or (JAX-RS + Angular 2)), the cloud provider and etc.

2) Defining tasks, teams and start the real work

We’ll have some tasks created prior to the event, but as a result of the discussions, the need of new ones may arise. After we have the bunch of things to work on, we’ll split up in teams and grab the highest priority stories. We are absolutely sure that we can’t complete the whole website in one shot. That’s why this is the first part of a series of workshops that will happen in the next months.

Everyone is welcome to join the fun with us and participate in the development of the JUG.BG 3.0 website the Java EE stack.

Prerequisites: