This week I attended GWT.create in Munich which is hosted by the IBM partner Vaadin. I used the opportunity to learn a little about the Vaadin framework which has become very popular with a big community of developers.
As I understand Vaadin is especially useful to build web based business applications with views and forms rapidly without having to write client side HTML and JavaScript code as described in the documentation:
“While traditional web programming is a fun way to spend your time learning new web technologies, you probably want to be productive and concentrate on the application logic. The server-side Vaadin framework takes care of managing the user interface in the browser and the AJAX communications between the browser and the server. With the Vaadin approach, you do not need to learn and deal directly with browser technologies, such as HTML or JavaScript.”
Check out the hello world sample which is purely written in Java. “The Vaadin client-side framework includes Google Web Toolkit (GWT), which provides a compiler from Java to the JavaScript that runs in the browser, as well a full-featured user interface framework. With this approach, Vaadin is pure Java on both sides.”
Vaadin runs on IBM WebSphere Liberty. In November the Vaadin team added a Vaadin boilerplate to Bluemix that you should try out. Note that for some reason you need to clone and build the code locally first and then push to Bluemix before you can run the sample app.
At GTW.create, by the way, we presented IBM Bluemix in the showcase area. I had a lot of talks with developers who’ve never heard about Bluemix but were really excited by the capabilities. The photo below is from our first lottery.
