SparkJava and Webjars

I've been playing around with Per Wendel's Spark framework. It's a micro framework inspired by Sinatra and it's in the same vein of node.js and ruby-on-rails. Just the thing is, Spark is Java and by being Java, the whole Java ecosystem is available.

I started learning Spark via the readme section of the site. Once you get through the basics, you start working in your favorite Java stuff. For me, the first thing I wanted to work in is Webjars.

Webjars is this thing we it pack jars with client-side libraries. This allows us to manage client-side libraries using various Java build tools like maven, ivy or gradle.

Adding webjars into an maven project is painless. It's a dependency. Here's a webjar for bootstrap3:

<dependency>  
    <groupId>org.webjars</groupId>  
    <artifactId>bootstrap</artifactId>  
    <version>3.2.0</version>  
</dependency>  

With the webjar added. We now need to tell Spark about it and serve them files. This took me a couple of hours to make it work. I had to figure out that webjars unpack to /META-INF/resources folder and tell Spark about it. It also helped that I looked at Spark's source code and realized that is a special Java servelet.

// Serve our client-side files from here
staticFileLocation("/META-INF/resources"); 

And reference it in our template like this:

<link rel='stylesheet' href='webjars/bootstrap/3.1.0/css/bootstrap.min.css'>

There. Spark app with webjars.

Poor man's responsive web testing

Websites use to be easy to make and test but with the rise of mobile devices has slightly complicated things. This is the whole responsive web design thing.

Now I bet you've typed "browser responsive testing" into Google and found Browser Stack. And I bet you found out they are not exactly cheap. So we do the next best thing and setup Matt Kersley's solution.

Matt also has a github repo for this with instructions to have it installed locally. You can do this by either setting up a XAMPP install or local apache.

Not exactly pixel perfect but close enough.

Happy testing!