2 posts tagged with "Showcase"

In my time working with documentation and coding for customers I have built quite the number of demo apps myself, so by now I know what the shortcuts look like. The dataset is always small, with authentication and advanced features "coming soon" or hardcoded in instead of properly implemented. Filtering works fast, because coincidentally there are only five rows to filter. All of that isn't to say those demos are bad, after all they serve their purpose, but I wanted to see how efficiently I could build a demo that doesn't cut corners while still being small and easy to understand.

The webforJ Bookstore is my attempt at that. It's a book inventory manager built on webforJ and Spring Boot with live table filtering, colored genre chips, a data-bound edit drawer, and Spring Security handling who can do what. This post covers the pieces I found most worth writing about.

I've been working with webforJ for a while now, mostly on documentation and component demos. But I recently wanted to build something small from scratch to try out a feature I hadn't used yet: installable apps.

The idea is that your web app can be "installed" on a device, kind of like a native app. It gets its own icon on the home screen or in the app launcher, and when you open it, the browser UI is gone. Your app gets its own window.

I built a habit tracker called Streak to test it out. I wanted to see what it takes to make a webforJ app feel like a "real" app instead of a website, and the installable apps feature turned out to be the key piece.