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WebJars Officially Launched!

Posted by: James Ward on 10/31/2012

Check it out: webjars.org

Back in April I started an experiment called “WebJars” to see if it would be useful to package web libraries (JavaScript, CSS, etc) as Jar files. WebJars allow you to declaratively set client-side application dependencies just like we do for the server-side. A nice side effect of this is transitive dependencies. For instance, if you specify Bootstrap 2.2.1 as a dependency, then you automatically also get jQuery 1.8.2 as well. WebJars also make it easy to know what versions of web libraries are being used since not all web libraries use versions in their naming conventions.

Today WebJars are moving from an experiment to something real! I’ve launched the new webjars.org site and released all of the WebJars to Maven Central. The new site has a list of all the WebJars and documentation on how to use WebJars in Play 2, Servlet 3, Dropwizard, and Spring MVC apps.

I hope that WebJars help you build modern web applications! Let me know what you think of WebJars. Thanks!

James Ward's complete blog can be found at: http://www.jamesward.com/

About James Ward

James Ward (www.jamesward.com) works for Typesafe where he teaches developers the Typesafe Stack (Play Framework, Scala, and Akka) . James frequently presents at conferences around the world such as JavaOne, Devoxx, and many other Java get-togethers. Along with Bruce Eckel, James co-authored First Steps in Flex. He has also published numerous screencasts, blogs, and technical articles. Starting with Pascal and Assembly in the 80′s, James found his passion for writing code. Beginning in the 90′s he began doing web development with HTML, Perl/CGI, then Java. After building a Flex and Java based customer service portal in 2004 for Pillar Data Systems he became a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe. In 2011 James became a Principal Developer Evangelist at Salesforce.com where he taught developers how to deploy apps on the cloud with Heroku. James Tweets as @_JamesWard and posts code at github.com/jamesward.

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