Fast way to develop AngularJS in a Java environment

Question

I am currently working on a Java based Maven project that has a REST backend module and using angular JS as a frontend that uses the backend for data. The 2 modules are named "rest" and "web" accordingly and are deployed as 2 separate war files to a glassfish instance during development. The glassfish is on a different machine.

My problem is that this is kind of slow, especially when developing the angular based frontend. Fix a minor spelling mistake, package, redeploy. Not that slow but every character change or fiddling with angular is another 20-30 seconds lost.

One thing I tried is to directly load the files from the source directory into the browser with file:// tag. This is OK as long as it tries to call the REST backend which fails due to CORS (I don't remember the exact error message, it just doesn't work). This happens a lot so it's a no-go.

I'm open to every kind of solution to develop angular in a way that I could see my changes instantly instead of deploying it every time? Much like the guy does in the egghead videos.

Answer 1

I would recommend breaking your Angular JS application into its own separate project, this would be a new HTML5 project on Netbeans. That way you can focus on pure backend and frontend development in their respective projects and you do not have to manually separate the war files. This link will help you to get CORS working if you are defining your RESTFUL services with Jersey Access-Control-Allow-Origin in ajax call to jersey rest web services. Or you can just mock the data out in the front end project.