Making a Spring Boot Standalone Web application which will run in desktop

Question

I am making a Restful API Web Application :-

• BackEnd :- Spring Boot
• FrontEnd :- Angular 2
• Database :- MySQL

Is it possible to package the app as a standalone Installer or maybe a single Jar file which can be run on clients Windows Machine and it will install all the required platforms like jre,apache tomcat,mysql,etc and create an icon which will open the app in the browser ?

If it is not possible then what are the possible alternatives from which we can achieve similar behavior.

Answer 1

A web application running in a client's windows machine is not the best scenario; but since you are open to alternatives, here is a possible alternative solution:

• Dockerize your web application
• Install docker on the client's machine
• Pull the docker image from a private docker registry or distribute your own image to the client
• Shortcut a command to run in the format "docker run OPTIONS IMAGE"; do not forget to expose your ports
• Open the browser and access the app.

I would never try this, please use a server instead...