Daniel Andres Pelaez Lopez - Full-Stack Web Development with Jakarta EE and Vue.js

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Full-stack development has been a trending term the last years, but what does full-stack development really mean? I will try to answer that question in the following paragraphs and link it with this book.

When I started my career as a software engineer, 12 years ago, the technologies I used were Java EE for the back end, using MVC with JSF, HTML, jQuery, over a server like Jboss or Weblogic. Everything was server side.

In those times, as a back-end developer, I needed to code on the front-end side also. I learned JavaScript and CSS to render a page that consumes the back-end logic.

Today, things have changed. We have a lot of back-end frameworks, like Spring, Jakarta EE, Micronaut, Quarks, only to mention a few. And on the front-end side, we also have Vue.js, Reac.js, Angular.js, and so on.

The distinction over front end and back end is greater today than before. The front-end frameworks are not server side anymore; they are client side.

This moved the industry to create new specialized roles: we have front-end developers and back-end developers. As the frameworks in both sides get bigger and more complex each year, mastering both sides at the same time is hard.

However, companies become complex also, having a lot of software components, in different languages, using different frameworks. Companies started to have problems finding talent and retain it, as they will need to hire a lot of developers with different roles to pull off even one project. Companies started to search for workers with more complex roles: engineers with abilities to master both sides of the coin, front-end and back-end.

This conflict between software engineers abilities and companies interests opens a new concept: Full-Stack Engineer.

A Full-Stack Engineer is someone who has mastered front-end and back-end sides, or at least, thats what people think. This new role allows companies to hire lees engineers, and the engineers are able to apply their knowledge more broadly.

Full-Stack Engineer is a pretty interesting concept because it looks familiar. If the previous definition was true, 10 years ago I was a Full-Stack Engineer, and maybe all of my peers were also Full-Stack Engineer.

I cannot say if the previous definition of Full-Stack Engineer is true or not, but what I can say is this: dont get locked in by one technology or one language or framework; be open to learning both sides of the coin. Maybe you wont master both, but, in the end thats what a software engineer does: build software to solve problems, and it doesnt matter which toolset you use.

I prefer to call myself a software engineer as this opens an entire world of possibilities.

In this book, you will see the journey of a full-stack/software engineer: from learning how to set up a development environment, to monitoring an application in production.

In Chapters , you will see how to set up your environment to use Jakarta EE as a back-end framework and Vue.js as a front-end framework.

Chapter shows you how to build a proof of concept, using only Vue.js, creating a whole application for user management.

Chapter shows you a fictional delivery company named Daniels Delivery, its current state, and where they want to be. You will see an analysis of how to move from Daniels Delivery today, to where they want to be, using high-level requirements, stories and quality attributes, ending with a new software architecture. The next chapters will solve Daniels Delivery problems, using Jakarta EE and Vue.js.

In Chapter , you start modeling the data for Daniels Delivery and create a back end using JakartaEE to connect to a database, and finally, you will see how to create unit and integration tests.

In Chapter , you will see the high-level requirements for Daniels Delivery, breaking them over wireframes and mapping them to Vue.js components. Finally, you will see the Vue.js implementation for the shopping cart.

In Chapter , you will see how to expose and modify your data using JAX-RS and RESTful services in the Jakarta EE back-end, and of course, unit and integration tests.

In Chapter you will connect Vue.js and JakartaEE using RESTful services through the Axios framework and handling exceptions.

In Chapter , you will learn the basics of securing a full-stack application, starting from authentication and authorization, and ending with a configuration using Keycloak for OAuth2 and OIDC protocols.

In Chapter to secure Daniels Delivery application, from the front-end to the back-end, using Keycloak.

In Chapter , you will learn some of the good practices of building full-stack applications, from decoupling, security, and databases, to RESTful design.

In Chapter , you will design and implement the cloud architecture for Daniels Delivery using AWS as an infrastructure provider.