Vaadin
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This section gives a step-by-step guide for setting up a development environment. Vaadin supports a wide variety of tools, so you can use any IDE for writing the code, most web browsers for viewing the results, any operating system or processor supported by the Java 1.5 platform, and almost any Java server for deploying the results. In this example, we use the following toolchain:
Figure 2.2, “Development Toolchain and Process” illustrates the development environment and process. You develop your application as an Eclipse project. The project must include, in addition to your source code, the Vaadin Library. It can also include your project-specific themes. You must compile and deploy a project to a web container before you can use use it. You can deploy a project through the Web Tools Platform for Eclipse, which allows automatic deployment of web applications from Eclipse. You can deploy a project also manually, by creating a web application archive (WAR) and deploying it through the web container's interface. Java SDK is required by Vaadin and also by the Eclipse IDE. Vaadin is compatible with Java 1.5 and later editions.
Eclipse is now installed in
You have two basic options for installing Eclipse in Linux and UNIX: you can either install it using the package manager of your operating system or by downloading and installing the packages manually. The manual installation method is recommended, because the latest versions of the packages available in a Linux package repository may be incompatible with Eclipse plugins that are not installed using the package manager.
An alternative to the above procedure is to use the package management system of your operating system. For example, in Ubuntu Linux, which includes Sun Java SDK and Eclipse in its APT repository, you can install the programs from a package manager GUI or from command-line with a command such as: This is, however, not recommended, because the Eclipse package may not include all the necessary Java EE tools, most importantly the Web Standard Tools, and it may cause incompatibilities with some components that are not installed with the package management system of your operating system. Apache Tomcat is a lightweight Java web server suitable for both development and production. There are many ways to install it, but here we simply decompress the installation package. Apache Tomcat should be installed with user permissions. During development, you will be running Eclipse or some other IDE with user permissions, but deploying web applications to a Tomcat server that is installed system-wide requires administrator or root permissions.
Vaadin supports many web browsers and you can use any of them for development. If you plan to create a custom theme, customized layouts or new user interface components, we recommend that you use Firefox together with Firebug for debugging. Vaadin contains special support for Firebug and can show debug information in its console. If you do not have Firefox installed already, go to www.getfirefox.com and download and run the installer. Optional. After installing Firefox, use it to open http://www.getfirebug.com/. Follow the instructions on the site to install the latest stable version of Firebug available for the browser. You might need to tell Firefox to allow the installation by clicking the yellow warning bar at the top of the browser-window. When Firebug is installed, it can be enabled at any time from the bottom right corner of the Firefox window. Figure 2.3, “Firebug Debugger for Firefox” shows an example of what Firebug looks like. Now that you have installed the development environment, you can proceed to creating your first application. If you are using the Eclipse IDE, using the Vaadin plugin should help greatly. The plugin includes:
You can install the plugin as follows:
Detailed and up-to-date installation instructions for the Eclipse plugin can be found at http://vaadin.com/eclipse. If you have automatic updates enabled in Eclipse (see → → → ), the Vaadin plugin will be updated automatically along with other plugins. Otherwise, you can update the Vaadin plugin (there are actually multiple plugins) manually as follows:
Notice that updating the Vaadin plugin updates only the plugin and not the Vaadin library, which is project specific. See below for instructions for updating the library. Updating the Vaadin plugin does not update Vaadin library. The library is project specific, as a different version might be required for different projects, so you have to update it separately for each project. To change the library to a newer (or some other) version, do as follows:
You can observe that the new library appears in the
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