Full stack simple Conway's Game of Life web app.

A full-stack web app for the classic evergreen Conway's Game of Life. This is an attempt on making something interactive through a web interface and, meanwhile, experimenting with some anti-patterns or "not-really-best-practices" for the Java way of doing things.

How to build and run

There are multiple ways to build and run this app. The easiest one is to use Maven's Spring Boot plugin:

mvn spring-boot:run

Then, go to your localhost:8080 and play the hell out of it. If you don't have Maven installed on your system, you can use the embedded one inside the root directory.

Technologies used

• Backend:
  • Java 1.8
  • Maven
  • Spring Boot
  • Lombok
  • Hibernate
  • MySQL
  • Slf4j + Logback
• Frontend:
  • HTML, JS, CSS
  • JSP
  • Bootstrap
  • JQuery
  • Vanilla-tilt

Project choices

• Everything about data manipulation has been done server-sided. This can be seen as a trade-off between security and robustness in exchange for a heavy and avoidable communication between the two parts. My main reason, anyway, was to play more with the backend side. If there were no concern about storing and elaborating data, I'd have considered doing everything client-side, maybe even using WebGL.
• I've deliberately avoided as much as possible Exception management. I've done this just to have fun and experiment with a different way of doing things.
• I've deliberately avoided any form of documentation, except for todos and personal quick memos, keeping the code as much self-explanatory as possible. On a big project that's not a library that somebody should use, this means cutting on documentation maintainance.
• I've tried the functional approach, with a template method through generics, so that the communication between the Controller layer and the Service one would have been painless and hopefully cleaner, at least for me:

gameService.generatePopulation(strategyType).ifNoErrors(
        populationData -> session.setAttribute(SESSION_BYTE_DATA, populationData));

• Lombok was used to avoid boilerplate code and to speed up prototyping.