devonfw intro
devonfw is a development platform aiming for standardization of processes and productivity boost, that provides an architecture blueprint for Java/JavaScript applications, alongside a set of tools to provide a fully functional out-of-the-box development environment.
You don’t need to click any links here. You can come back later if you like, but everything will be explained step by step later on.
The devonfw distributions can be obtained from the releases site and are packaged in a zip file that includes all the needed tools, software and configurations.
Having all the dependencies serf-contained in the distribution’s zip file, users don’t need to install or configure anything. Just extracting the zip content is enough to have a fully functional devonfw.
The list of software pre-installed with devonfw distributions is:
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Eclipse: pre-configured and fully functional IDE to develop Java based apps.
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Java: all the Java environment configured and ready to be used within the distribution.
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Maven: to manage project dependencies.
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Node: a NodeJS environment configured and ready to be used within the distribution.
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Sencha: devonfw also includes a installation of the Sencha CMD tool.
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SonarQube: a code quality tool.
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Tomcat: a web server ready to test the deploy of our artifacts.
For back-end solutions devonfw provides the devon4j platform as main implementation. With devon4j, users will find a standardized architecture blueprint for a Java applications based on Spring, and a set of best-of-breed technologies alongside a compendium of best practices and code conventions to build solid and reliable web applications.
With devonfw/devon4j developers have at their disposal an archetype to generate new server projects with all devon4j modules and pre-configurations ready to start to develop applications in a fully functional environment.
For project management and other life-cycle related tasks, devonfw provides also Devcon, a command line and graphic user interface cross platform tool.
With Devcon users can automate the creation of new projects (both server and client), build and run those and even, for server projects, deploy locally on Tomcat.
All those tasks can be done manually using Maven, Tomcat, Sencha CMD, Bower, Gulp, etc. but with Devcon users have the possibility of managing the projects without the necessity of dealing with all those different tools.
As part of the goal of productivity boosting, devonfw provides also to developers a set of modules, created from real projects requirements, that can be connected to projects saving all the work of a new implementation.
The current available modules are:
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async: module to manage asynchronous web calls in a Spring based server app. -
i18n: module for internationalization. -
integration: implementation of Spring integration. -
microservices: a set of archetypes to create a complete microservices infrastructure based on Spring Cloud Netflix. -
reporting: a module to create reports based on Jasper reports library. -
winauth active directory: a module to authenticate users against an Active Directory. -
winauth single sign on: module that allows applications to authenticate the users by the Windows credentials.
Next Chapter: devonfw IDE Setup
This documentation is licensed under the Creative Commons License (Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International).
