We often hear from users of our software (both our open source friends and our wonderful, supportive customers) that Gluon offers a lot of different software components, and indeed, we provide an end-to-end stack enabling the Java mobile enterprise. We do realise though that it is not always easy to understand upfront which components are needed to achieve a specific goal. Therefore, we have created Gluon Start, which is a web site that helps you generate the structure and skeleton of your Java client application.
On start.gluon.io, you define your own application specific properties, including the name and groupId you want to use for the generated Maven project. On the same start page, you select which JavaFX version and components you need. In some cases, developers intend to use the web component, in other cases, they use the FXML module and a bunch of others.
You can also define what parts of the Gluon Mobile stack you want to include in your projects. For example, you can select that you want to use Glisten (for the UI toolkit) and Gluon Maps. You can also select which Gluon Attach (device services) you need in your project. All options are easily selectable and Gluon Start will generate the project with correct dependencies for you!
If you want to connect your application in a flexible and secure way to an existing or new backend or cloud service, you can select that you want to use Gluon CloudLink as well.
Before you choose to generate and download the project, you can preview it and browse through all the project files online. This can also be very convenient if you’re just looking for the correct dependency version to use in your existing project.
After you have selected the components you need, Gluon Start will generate a Maven project for you, with all dependencies you need. You can of course still manipulate those dependencies after you’ve downloaded it, and add more non-Gluon dependencies, for example.
With Gluon Start, we are one step closer to our goal of making Java a first class option for mobile, and making it as easy as possible for existing Java developers to create Java client apps that work on desktop, mobile and embedded.
Have a look at the screenshots below (which you can click on for larger versions of the thumbnail) or watch our screencast on youtube. We encourage you to go straight to Gluon Start and get started there!
