Hello World Tutorial

With this tutorial you will learn how to create your first Scout application.

Create a Scout Project

Start your Eclipse IDE and select an empty directory for your workspace as shown in Figure 1. This workspace directory will then hold all the project code for the Hello World application. Once the Eclipse IDE is running it will show the Java perspective.

sdk start new workspace
Figure 1. Select a new empty folder to hold your project workspace

To create a new Scout project select the menu File ▸ New ▸ Project…​ and type “Scout Project” in the wizard search field. Select the Scout Project wizard and press Next. The New Scout Project wizard is then started as shown in Figure 2.

sdk new project
Figure 2. The new Scout project wizard.

In the New Scout Project wizard you have to enter a group id, artifact id and a display name for your Scout project. As the created project will make use of Apache Maven please refer to the Maven naming conventions to choose group id and artifact id for your project. The artifact id will then also be the project name in the Eclipse workspace. The display name is used as the application name presented to the user (e.g. in the Browser title bar).

For the Hello World application just use the already prefilled values as sown in Figure 2. Then, click the Finish button to let the Scout SDK create the initial project code for you.

Depending on your Eclipse installation some Maven plugin connectors may be missing initially. In that case a dialog as shown in Figure 3 may be shown. To continue click on Finish to resolve the selected connectors. Afterwards confirm the installation, accept the license and the message that some content has not been signed. Finally, the installation of the maven plugin connectors requires a restart of the Eclipse IDE.

sdk new project connectors
Figure 3. The Maven plugin connector installation dialog.

After the New Scout Project wizard has created the initial Maven modules for the Hello World application these modules are compiled and built by the Eclipse IDE. In case of a successful Eclipse Scout installation your Eclipse IDE should display all created Maven modules in the Package Explorer and have an empty Problems view as shown in Figure 4.

sdk new project initial helloworld
Figure 4. The inital set of Maven modules created for the Hello World application.

Run the Application

After the initial project creation step we can start the Scout application for the first time. For this, the following three steps are necessary

  1. Start the Scout backend server

  2. Start the Scout frontend server

  3. Open the application in the browser

To start the Scout backend server we first select the [webapp] dev server.launch file in the Package Explorer view of the Eclipse IDE and then use the Run As menu as shown in Figure 5.

sdk start client product
Figure 5. Starting the Hello World application.

Starting the Scout frontend server works exactely the same. But first select the [webapp] dev ui.launch file in the Eclipse IDE. This launch file is located under module helloworld.ui.html.app.dev in the Package Explorer.

During startup of the Scout applications you should see console output providing information about the startup. After having successfully started the Scout backend and frontend servers the Hello World application can then be accessed by navigating to http://localhost:8082/ in your favorite web browser.

The running Hello World application should then be started in your browser as shown in Figure 6.

run helloworld in browser
Figure 6. The Hello World application in the browser.

What’s Next?

In the next tutorial, you will learn how to import the Scout demo applications into your workspace.


Do you want to improve this document? Have a look at the sources on GitHub.