Add support for a CLI

[ivargrimstad]

Create a CLI tool that is based on the archetypes to simplify the developer experience.

• Generate
• Start/Stop

[ivargrimstad]

Consider picocli and distribution with SDK Man

[m-reza-rahman]

The current consensus is that this is a low priority item to be implemented after the more important priorities are addressed. Concise input from key community members can be found here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bthiYVjX_UK7Xp2qQmq93awPwVhVCDnprGdzeMtv_ow/edit?usp=sharing. A discussion thread on the mailing list can be found here: https://www.eclipse.org/lists/starter-dev/msg00188.html.

[m-reza-rahman]

Personally I think we should invest our limited time to move forward other things first. For me a CLI could be considered later mostly to better support Gradle in the command line (e.g. invoking 'gradle init' behind the scenes on a generated Maven project). As such, even Gradle support itself is low priority. A limited set of hopefully self-explanatory Maven Archetypes should be easy enough to use both from the command line and IDE. A CLI is yet another thing for us to maintain/document and yet another thing for the user to install/configure/learn about after all. We should go this route when there is a clearer value proposition. Right now is definitely way too early.

[rcuprak]

I would really like to see a CLI similar to what is available for Angular (https://angular.io/cli). I primarily use the command line as opposed to a website. In my mind, this CLI would be more than just a simple utility to bootstrap a project. It would be nice if you could use it to "enable" features - such as add JPA, create an JPA entity, create a new restful web service, etc. It would also be beneficial if it could upgrade a project to a new version of Jakarta EE. In terms of installing the tool, have it deployed via a package manager (and updated accordingly) at least for Linux/Mac. I install practically all of my tools on MacOS using Brew (https://brew.sh). I think past projects, such as JBoss Forge, were too tied to an IDE. What trips people up when using Jakarta EE, is post-project creation steps. Try guiding someone through enabling JPA or standing-up their first JAX-RS service. Depending upon what they Google, they can end up writing code like it is 2009.

[kito99]

I'd like to add that we should consider using https://jreleaser.org/ for whatever we come up with. It seems like a great way to promote the project as well.

[kito99]

That being said, let's get the core stuff working first. No point in working on a CLI until you can at least use a decent web UI and get a ZIP file.

[m-reza-rahman]

I was honestly a fan of both Forge and seam-gen. However, looking at the scope, investment level, and goals of those efforts, I think a "Jakarta CLI" is a separate project to which this may or may not be a sub-component at some point. I think Spring Boot got it right by focusing simply on the very early getting started experience instead of full blown code generation akin to what a very feature rich IDE plugin for Jakarta EE would do.

[lprimak]

I think that in addition (maybe instead of) a command line utility, a simple curl command can be used to generate starters. Starter Web UI can print out a curl command based on the selections user makes, than they can copy / save / paste it into their "fresh docker" container to create a starter project.

As an example of this, see https://start.flowlogix.com

I will create a follow-up issue.

[m-reza-rahman]

While this is certainly a novel idea, it is unproven amongst other equivalents such as Spring, Quarkus, vendors, etc. I think the practical situation with our starter is that we do need to remain conservative and competitive with our peers to build on what credibility we have so far. We cannot afford big risks.

That said, this is what other community projects are for. When ideas gain greater traction, they can always be adopted later.

[lprimak]

FYI: Spring has a Rest Starter API that's feature rich: https://docs.spring.io/initializr/docs/0.4.x/reference/html/command-line.html that already does most of what I am advocating for.
I have talked to Josh Long, Spring's developer advocate, and he is pushing for the idea of curl and maven archetype command line print / sharing from the UI, which is what https://start.flowlogix.com already does.