HbnContainer has won the final add-on competition round in December. Congratulations for Matti Tahvonen! This is what he writes about the history of the add-on:
"It's nice to get a gadget that I wouldn't normally dare to spend my few bucks on. Still, I'm bit sad that it was the HbnContainer that actually won. I haven't found time (or motivation to organize some) for it lately. Instead I have built a dozen of Add-ons that do some cools stuff with new technologies and tries to push the limits of browser programming further. I'm quite enthusiastic about some of them. But none of them have become as popular as the HbnContainer - the boring, inactive, matured and not so finished JEE helper. Nowadays it isn't even that unique either. At least Lazy Query Container, JPAContainer and EclipseLink Container tries to achieve related goals and all of them have been somewhat successfull too. I guess it means that the data binding area is the one where people most often need helpers outside of the core Vaadin library.
HbnContainer was born back in the "IT Mill Toolkit era". It was a quickly typed example how to create a lazy loading container for Hibernate entity beans. Practically I wanted to proof that it is possible to list a huge amount of data (that can't fit into JVM memory) in our famous lazy loading Table component with edit support and all related bells and whistles. It should be quite efficient regarding memory usage and query count. On its way it has developed further, thanks to some patches from the community. Lots of enhancements also happened when gave a kick start for the Directory project with Marc Englund and Henri Sara. At the same time I also created the first implementation of the CustomField which has been further developed and extended by Henri.
- Matti
BTW. I'm loaded with work on the core framework. If some active user of HbnContainer wishes to take the project lead - please let me know and we'll make required arrangements."
With this round, the Vaadin add-on competition has ended. Once again - congratulations for all the winners:
- Toolkit Productivity Tools by Dmitri Livotov (April)
- Chrometric by Marc Englund (May)
- GWT Graphics by Henri Kerola (June)
- AppFoundation by Kim Leppänen (July)
- Lazy Query Container by Tommi Laukkanen (August)
- Visualizations for Vaadin by Phil Barrett (September)
- ICEPush by Artur Signell (October)
- Refresher by Henrik Paul (November)
- HbnContainer by Matti Tahvonen(December)
All in all - the competition has been a great success: now we have 153 add-ons in the directory for everyone to use! My sincere thanks for all the great people who have contributed - please keep up good work sharing your amazing ideas!
- Joonas