Building an application with modern Java technologies

Sometimes Java gets a bad rap from Agile software developers, who suspect it to be a legacy technology on par of Cobol. I understand that being the most used language on the planet means there must be projects of any kind out there, including lots of legacy. That said, Java and the JVM are a huge and alive ecosystem producing value in all kind of domains from banking to Android applications and scientific software.

So I built a sample Game Of Life with what I believe are modern Java tecnologies:

• Java 8 with lambdas support
• Gradle for build automation and dependency resolution (substitutes both Ant and Maven)
• Jetty as an embedded server to respond to HTTP requests
• Jersey for building the RESTful web service calculating new generations of a plane, using JAX-RS
• Freemarker templating engine to build HTML
• Log4j 2 for logging, encapsulated behind the interface slf4j.

On the testing side of things:

• JUnit 4 for unit testing infrastructure
• Mockito for Test Doubles
• JUnit Quickcheck for property-based testing
• Selenium for browser-based testing

Here's the result:

The application is self-contained and can be compiled, tested and run without any IDE or previous machine setup except having a JDK 8 on your machine. See the project on Github for details.