My UW App Seed

This is a seed project intended to be used as a template for creating applications in My UW in a new way.

Rather than creating a Portlet, developers can clone this project and write a Servlet 3 web application that can deployed with My UW Madison.

Requirements

This application assumes you are familiar with Maven, have it installed, and have a settings.xml appropriate for interacting with UW's Maven Artifact Repository.

Getting started

1. git clone git@github.com:UW-Madison-DoIT/my-app-seed.git your-app-name
2. cd your-app-name
3. mvn install jetty:run

Point your browser at http://localhost:8080 and you'll see the familiar My UW frame.

Adding your content

The unique aspect about this project is that it overlays angularjs-portal-frame. That project provides us the frame that My UW uses: the header, the sidebar, and the footer. It provides us an extension point in a file with a specific name: main.js.

That file is expected to be a require.js module, i.e. enclosed within a define() function. RequireJS can be used to include more javascript resources from within my-app.js. For example:

var myWidget = require(['my-widget.js'], function() {
  alert('Require runs my-widget.js first, and then this function.');
});

For detailed information, see the require.js quickstart guide and API documentation.

In main.js, you can see that we reference a variable named app. This variable is the result of angular.module that was provided by angularjs-portal-frame.

With that reference we can use Angular to register app-specific controllers, services, directives, etc.

The example in this project does a number of things:

• The define block includes all of the necessary routes, controllers, services, etc. that we need for our app to run. Every time you add a new view/module, you will want to include its various components here.
• The var app declaration includes the pieces that the angular application needs to know about.
• The app.config block establishes routes that the application needs to know about. Whenever you add a new module/view, you will need to add its route here and in the /WEB-INF/web.xml file in order for your application to find it.
• The app.config block also instantiates and initializes the color palettes to be used by Angular Material elements (i.e. anything with the "md-" prefix). See Angular Material - Configuring a Theme for more information.

Why is this a multi-module project?

Generally, projects that use this seed are a little larger in nature and have other modules encapsulating parts of the code base. You would see other modules that are siblings of the war module like:

• api
• impl
• security
• integration

If your application won't have these things, you probably should consider a portlet instead.