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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.

When building web applications that consume REST APIs, one of the most important decisions you'll make is how to load and manage your data. Load everything at once for snappy client-side operations, or fetch data on-demand to keep memory usage low? The answer, as with most things in software development, is: it depends.

In this post, we'll explore two distinct approaches to loading data from REST APIs in webforJ applications, examining the trade-offs of each and showing you exactly how to implement them using Spring Boot and webforJ's repository patterns.

Remember learning about Model-View-Controller (MVC) in university? For most, at least from what I hear when speaking to others, they had to actually create an app following this design paradigm, which greatly helps any future use of this pattern in the "real world."

For me, that class was right in the middle of COVID. Our instructor was a nice enough guy, but between the Zoom fatigue and lack of experience (I'm fairly sure it was his first or second term teaching), not only did we not end up actually building anything, but we spent time doing theoretical explorations of the various design patterns out there, with MVC only receiving a few days of review.

All this to say that when I started working with webforJ, I saw it as the perfect opportunity to finally get hands-on with MVC—not just to understand the pattern properly this time, but also to learn how webforJ fits into this paradigm. Building a stereotypical todo app seemed like the ideal way to explore both.

We all probably know this situation; browsing a website or webapp, make a simple misclick and instinctively try to go back or undo it. Only to then be somewhere completely else, worst case not even on the site anymore.

Seeing that user experience is one of the most important factors in modern web development, that scenario is one of the many reasons why a robust and well-maintained routing system is so important for your Single Page Application (SPA).

In this article, I will give a quick overview on how to achieve that with webforJ. First we will take a look at movement between views, preserving different states, and in general intuitive interaction with our app. In around 10 minutes, you should be able to set up routes, handle advanced navigation scenarios, and follow the best practices for future maintenance.

As I went through my computer science education at Oregon State, I realized pretty quickly that I enjoyed the UI side of things. Messing around with CSS (yes, even trying to center a div) and making pages that looked nice appealed to me way more than databases and business logic.

Somehow, I ended up working at a company that primarily used Java. Lucky for me, the project I ended up on was a Java web framework - back in my comfort zone!

I've been able to keep myself pretty much in UI land since then, in my comfort zone and happy to let my colleagues deal with all that back end stuff.

Recently our framework, webforJ, released Spring integration, and with that, my blissful isolation in UI land came to an end. As my first foray into full-stack development, I was asked to build a (very, very simple) CRUD application using Spring and webforJ both so I could learn more about the back end, and also showcase webforJ and Spring together in one project.

TLDR: It went well.