While Vaadin is not bound to any specific IDE, and you can in fact easily use it without any IDE altogether, we provide special support for the Eclipse IDE, which has become the most used environment for Java development. The support is provided in the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse, which allows you to:
Create new Vaadin projects
Create custom themes
Create custom widgets
Create composite components with a visual designer
Easily upgrade to a newer version of the Vaadin library
The Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse is our recommended way of installing Vaadin for development. Using just the JAR or loading Vaadin from a Maven repository is also possible.
Installing and updating the Eclipse plugin is covered in Section 2.2.1, “Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse” and the creation of a new Vaadin project using the plugin in Section 2.3.1, “Creating the Project”. See Section 8.4, “Creating a Theme in Eclipse”, Section 11.2, “Doing It the Simple Way in Eclipse”, and Chapter 7, Visual User Interface Design with Eclipse for instructions on using the different features of the plugin.