Developers¶

If you wish to contribute to davos (and help me tidy up some of its rather messy code!), you will need to be able to build and run it locally. davos is written almost completely in Java using the Spring Framework, utilising the Thymeleaf rendering engine. The project is unit and integration tested using jUnit and Cucumber JVM, respectively.

Setup¶

Download and install the Java 8 JDK. I’d also recommend using Spring Tool Suite (STS) as it is a prebuilt version of Eclipse IDE with all of the necessary plugins installed for working with a Spring application.

Building¶

Note

You do not need to pre-install Gradle for this application as it comes with Gradle Wrapper, which does all the work for you.

To build the application, use Gradle:

./gradlew clean build -Penv={release|local}

This will download all necessary dependencies, run tests, then package up the application. The resulting .jar file will be in build/libs. If you pass through a -Penv=release when running this command, the packaged application will use the config under conf/release, which tells davos to use a file-based database. By default (i.e. if you do not pass this switch through), it will use the conf/local configuration, which makes use of an in-memory database.

Running the app¶

It is recommended to build the app first before running, so you know your latest changes are built:

./gradlew clean build && java -jar build/libs/davos-2.2.0.jar

Development¶

Classpath¶

When using Eclipse (or STS), a separate Gradle command is required in order to update the project’s classpath files so Eclipse is aware of the downloaded dependencies:

./gradlew cleanEcipse eclipse

Code Structure¶

The code of davos is split in to four main sections:

src/main/java

The core functional code. This contains all logic for the workflow, API, connectivity, and object persistence (database).

src/main/resources

The front-end code, including all JavaScript, CSS, images, and Thymeleaf templates.

src/test/java

All unit tests for the core code

src/cucumber/java

Integration test code. This is separate to the main project code and does not get packaged in to the released application.

Running Tests¶

To run all unit tests, use Gradle:

./gradlew test

To run all integration tests:

./gradlew cucumber

Managing the version¶

The version of the application is referenced in three files:

version.txt in the project root directory
conf/local/application.properties as a property called davos.version
conf/release/application.properties as a property called davos.version

All three of these need to be updated if you are changing the version number.