Even though we have created the frontend of the Message App in Chapter 2, Vue.js 2 - It Works in the Way You Expected, and the backend in Chapter 3, Spring 5 - The Right Stack for the Job at Hand, and mentioned the usage of VS Code, we haven't talked about how to set up the development environment. In this section, we will go through the tools we're going to use to build the TaskAgile application. However, we won't cover the details of a step-by-step installation of those tools. You can use this section as an overview of the development environment requirement.
Our development environment includes mainly the following parts:
- Runtime
- Database
- Code editor/IDE
- Source control system
- Utilities
The runtime for the frontend will be the browser. In our case, it is Chrome. The backend runtime is the JRE (short for Java Runtime Environment), which is included in the JDK (short for Java Development Kit). We use JDK 8 (http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/overview/index.html).
The database we will use is MySQL 5.7. The code editor we will use is still VS Code. Even though VS Code is not an IDE (short for Integrated Development Environment), such as IntelliJ IDEA, it can help us with most of our daily coding, debugging through a variety of extensions. In Chapter 3, Spring 5 - The Right Stack for the Job at Hand, we have listed those we need for both frontend and backend development. The fascinating part of VS Code is that it is written in TypeScript and open sourced on GitHub (https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode).
The source control system that we will use is Git. And, while we're implementing TaskAgile, we will push the code to vuejs.spring-boot.mysql, a public repository on GitHub (https://github.com/taskagile/vuejs.spring-boot.mysql). In this way, once we finish the implementation, besides a working application, you can also see all of the commits that we make along the way. And we will use GitHub Desktop (https://desktop.github.com) as the GUI client.
The utilities we will use are those for dependency management and building the package. For the frontend, we will use Node.js 8.11.0+. For the backend, we will use Maven 3.2+. And the other tool that we will use is MySQL Workbench 6.3. We have used it in Chapter 5, Data Modeling - Designing the Foundation of the Application, for physical data modeling. During the implementation, we mainly use its Visual SQL Editor to check the data records and executing SQL queries.
Before we move on, you will need to have the following installed:
- Node.js 8.11.0 +
- JDK 1.8.0_152 +
- MySQL 5.7 +
- Git 2.15.1 +