Spring + Hibernate + Angular + Maven + Tomcat Project folder structure issues - angularjs

Question

Okay, so I have been trying all day to sort this out. My boss has assigned me a new task: Take this template: https://github.com/DavidKk/ngAdmin , figure out how AngularJS works, figure out how Spring works, how does Hibernate work, how does Maven work for project builds, tests etc, implement a basic CRUD example inside that template on a MySQL database, deploy on Tomcat.
So, first, this is a lot of stuff all at once, stuff that I have not ever worked with, maybe with Hibernate and a bit with JPA, and he wants all this stuff sorted out by the end of the week, when we will talk more about the project with the client, so we can tell him what approach we will take on the development process.
I took a look at Spring, used Spring Initializr: https://start.spring.io/ to make a basic project, used the jar command tool to make a WAR file, deployed it on tomcat, and it worked. I have used these two, because IntelliJ Commuity has none of these implemented, unless you pay for the Ultimate edition.
I took a look at this CRUD example: http://www.concretepage.com/spring-4/spring-mvc-4-rest-angularjs-hibernate-4-integration-crud-tutorial-with-ngresource-example , and made it work, and understood how Spring uses dependency injection, how Hibernate persists objects into the database, and how AngularJS provides the single-page layout that my client has asked for.
Now, my problem is, this template has a whole different directory structure, and if I move files around nothing is going to work. Starting everything from scratch is not an option, we take a front end template, modify it a little bit, develop the back-end stuff for client and server. What I do not understand is how I could ever use this with Spring, which has a whole different directory structure, or with Tomcat, which expects different stuff too, or it will throw me a 404. From what I have seen, this project has been built with Grunt, so I do not know if there is any way to go from Grunt to Maven, and have it still work. I don't really know what to do, and I must finish this by the end of the week. Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

Answer 1

The template you show is only for the front-end.
Create a project with spring initializer.
You'll have {directory}/src/main/java and other stuff.
Create {directory}/client/
Put the ngAdmin stuff in it.
ngAdmin uses grunt to build the client, and generate the site in the dest directory. This will be {directory}/client/dest/
Configure maven-frontend-plugin to install js stuff and run grunt when building with maven.
Add maven-resource-plugin configuration to copy from {directory}/client/dest/ to ${project.build.directory}/client
Configure maven war plugin to include this directory
<plugin>
<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
<artifactId>maven-war-plugin</artifactId>
<configuration>
<attachClasses>true</attachClasses>
<webResources>
<resource>
<directory>${project.build.directory}/client</directory>
</resource>
</webResources>
</configuration>
</plugin>
This way, when you build the war, the client should be in it (unzip the war and check)
Then you will have some config to tell spring-mvc where exactly to find those, but I don't have that on hand.
Hope this help.