URL Monitor in React and Spring Boot
Test URLs to see if they respond and if the response has the correct data. Built with Spring Boot and React in order to test the feasibility of that combo.
This is a hobby project that I created on my own. The basic idea is to ping a URL and see if it
- responds with a 200
- if that response contains the text that you’re expecting.
You’re able to add single URLs and export/import them in bulk. The app also supports auto-refresh every minute.
Prerequisites
- Java 8 (to run)
- Maven 3 (to build and/or run)
Usage
Download a release from the releases page.
Run from the command line: java -jar url-monitor-VERSION.jar
This will start an embedded Tomcat server inside the war file. Then navigate to the local server http://localhost:8080 or the remote server where you started the app http://yourserverhere:8080
Possible Next Steps
- remove node/ and node_modules/ from the final jar (The final jar is too big, 100+ MB. That could easily come down by removing those directories.)
- add Java tests (This was a non-prod, hobby project so I cut some corners… my bad.)
Help and More Info
You can find more info on the GitHub repo or by emailing derrek @ derrek.young.com
https://github.com/derrekyoung/url-monitor-react-springboot/
Closing Thoughts
Actually though, my main motivation for this project was mostly wanted to experiment with merging React and Spring Boot into a self-contained, cross-platform application. This app uses Spring Boot, Webpack, Node, React, Bootstrap, and a few other modules.
The experiment was mostly a success but I think this combo is not the way to go for cross-platform apps. Server-side web apps, sure, ok, maybe. But the dev process here kind of sucks. Merging webpack with Spring Boot introduced too much latency in the test cycle compared to a straight Node.js cycle. This combo takes all the good things of React/Node and ruins them. I think that my next cross-platform app/experiment will be pure Node.js and based on Electron or NW.js. We shall see.
