General

My specs while developing

java version "1.8.0_51"

Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.8.0_51-b16)

Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 25.51-b03, mixed mode)

javac 1.8.0_51

These exact specs shouldn't be necessary to run the application, some version of Java 8 is required though.

Building and running

The project is built with Maven. A wrapper has been included for Maven so that you won't have to download maven if you don't want to (provided the wrapper works!). To run, clone the project and cd into its working directory. From here it should simply be a case of running:

    ./mvnw spring-boot:run

Then if you go to http://localhost:8080/ you should be able to make use of the site.

The backend has a fairly comprehensive test suite, if you want to run the tests while building, run:

    ./mvnw package

This will generate a jar file under the generated 'target' directory that can be ran with:

    java -jar <jar_name_here>

Other information

The backend application makes use of h2, an in-memory Java database to store data (this database is populated at startup using Spring's CommandLineRunner). I don't believe this should cause any issues, but if you do run into any at the database level this may be relevant.

In addition, the backend also makes use of the Lombok library which provides a way to remove boilerplate such as getters/setters via annotations. If you use an IDE you will likely have to do some minor configuration for it to play nicely with Lombok. This is fairly straightforward for both Eclipse and IntelliJ. IntelliJ should tell you what to do (enable annotation processing and download the Lombok plugin), I'm afraid I'm not too sure for Eclipse but I imagine it will be a similar process.

Thanks,

Adam :)