I'm a big fan of Dropwizard, and I thought it would be a really fun Java project to get acquainted with RESTful APIs, clean Java libraries like JDBI, and just have some fun with Java.
This project is really the dropwizard-example, with some minor tweaks to handle running BackboneJS and Twitter Bootstrap.
I think this is fun stuff, and I was unaware of how cool and easy Backbone is to get running.
Check this project out if you'd like to toy with it. I'd suggest starting by understanding what is required to run Dropwizard:
- Java 6+
- Maven
And then you can bootstrap the app and just go with it:
mvn install
java -jar target/allthatjazz-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar setup hello-world.yml
# then, run it
java -jar target/allthatjazz-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar server hello-world.yml
This is really just a facny front-end for a few really polished libraries. I'd really just look at the Dropwizard documentation to really learn what this is about.