Thank you for choosing Udash! Your Udash Starter Pack is ready to compile and run. It contains simple chat application, which presents example usage of the most important Udash features, e.g. properties and bidirectional RPC, Bootstrap Components, i18n, etc.

The project is using SBT for configuration. We assume that you have SBT installed on your system, so when you type sbt sbtVersion in your console, you should see something like:

[info] 1.3.6

From our experience the most convenient way to develop Udash applications is to keep compilation of the backend and the frontend modules separate. This configuration follows this rule, but feel free to change it as you like. The compilation of the whole project can be triggered with the following command: sbt compile compileStatics run.

• compile - compiles all sources with standard Scala compiler.
• compileStatics - compiles all static resources of the frontend module, it depends on:
  • copyAssets - copies all assets from frontend/src/main/assets to the target directory,
  • compileCss - starts CssRenderer from the backend module and creates CSS files in the target directory,
  • fastOptJS - compiles Scala sources to the JavaScript file.
• compileAndOptimizeStatics - it's similar to compileStatics, but it depends on fullOptJS, so it creates minimized JS files.
• run - starts main class of the backend module - it runs Jetty server and you can open your application on http://127.0.0.1:8080.

The JVM launcher closes the server on user input, so you can tap Enter to stop it anytime.

When you work on your frontend application, you can keep the server running in an SBT session. At the same time you can run sbt ~compileStatics in another console and get a fresh frontend build on every source change. It will also render the CSS files every time.

When you open the app homepage in your browser, you should see a login page form. In the top-right corner you can change the page language. Below you can type user credentials (e.g. test and test; as described in the tooltip next to the "Username" field - credentials are defined in the application.conf file) and go to the chat window.

On the chat view you can type, send and read messages. You should try to open another browser window and check that messages and connection counts refresh automatically. Server notifies authenticated clients about these events via Server -> Client RPC notification. You receive a random set of permissions on every login, so sometimes you might not be able to send or read messages.

The application consists of three modules: shared, frontend and backend. In every module you can find another a README.md file describing its content.

Briefly:

• shared - contains a global model and a login of the application, it also keeps CSS styles definition and RPC interfaces;
• backend - holds the server-side logic, it uses Jetty as the servlets container;
• frontend - keeps views and the client's application logic.

Each module contains tests based on ScalaTest and ScalaMock. The frontend and shared modules use scalajs-env-selenium in order to run the tests compiled to JavaScript in a web browser. Take a look at browserCapabilities in build.sbt - it configures the tests to run on Google Chrome in headless mode. Just make sure you have ChromeDriver installed.

This configuration employs the SBT Native Packager in the packager module to provide easy deployment process. In this module you can find a customized application's configuration. With sbt packager/universal:packageBin you can create a zip archive with your application and nice starting scripts. Check the SBT Native Packager docs for more details.

Take a look around the codebase. You can find more detailed READMEs inside each of the modules. The code itself is also documented, so we hope you understand it without an issue. We recommend to start from the shared module.

You should also take a look at the Udash Developers Guide. If you have any questions, you can ask for help on our Gitter channel.