2 Your first application
This chapter covers
- Creating a Helidon application using Command Line Interface (CLI) and using Maven Archetypes
- Building executable jar, JLink optimized JVM and GraalVM native-image
- Making a Docker image and deploying it to Kubernetes
It’s the first practical chapter where we offer readers to do some coding, not only reading. It’s actually quite interesting how book writing methods evolutioned over time. When I was studying in the university and it was at the beginning of the 90s last century, technical books were quite boring to read. Authors didn’t care much about making the book enternainy. Study is work and work is not easy. Reading books required thinking about every single sentence and trying to understand what the author says. It was difficult, but it was forcing your brain to work. Now it’s changed. Books (and I mean technical books) are trying to be easy and fun to read, delivering the same amount of pure knowledge. It may sound strange, but these kinds of books are also easier and more fun to write, which is important for authors. We are trying to make our book easy to read and this short introduction is a part of ‘making fun’. But sometimes a sceptic inside me brings this topic to the agenda and suggests switching back to the older style. And I always say ‘no’.