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Community Spotlight - April 2015

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Matti Tahvonen
Matti Tahvonen
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On Apr 28, 2015 2:16:00 PM
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Spotlight, featured image

I just love it when smart people without previous experience learn to use Vaadin and write a blog entry about their experiences. Typically “externals” with a fresh honest mind can summarize the good parts of various tools better than those who stare at the details from a close distance. Just recently the Hackmag web magazine wrote a nice tutorial about Vaadin. An excellent article for those still considering using Vaadin for their next project.

Especially for those still considering to use Vaadin, I always try to emphasize that choosing Vaadin alone is no strategy. Vaadin is just the UI framework that helps you build excellent UX with less work. As Vaadin is often chosen by teams with “full stack Java developers”, many of you are probably eager to be more efficient at the persistency layer as well. I just wrote an article series to JAXenter about “JPA productivity boosters”, Spring Data, DeltaSpike Data and QueryDSL. Highly suggested for those who work with JPA, but don’t master these really handy tools yet. An example project for the helper libraries is naturally built using Vaadin ;-)

If you want other examples and real world use cases of how Vaadin can be used with other technologies, joining a local Vaadin Meetup Group is an excellent channel to share experiences and learn more about Vaadin and related technologies. There are already 20 different groups around the globe and if the closest one doesn’t feel local enough, it’d be great if you could be the one to start a new one in your country or city. Just contact us and we’ll help you get started!

Krishna Phani Kumar has continued his blog series about the Grid. The third part covers filters and generated columns and the latest part is focused on the editor row. Krishna’s source code examples are also available via GitHub.

The new version of Directory has been out for about a month now. If there are some regressions or improvements you’d like to get fixed, let us know through the feedback tab or via the forum. Especially the possibility to add icons seems to be a really popular feature. There are many existing add-ons that now have cool icons to build their own “brand”. In addition to a huge set of updates to existing add-ons, there are a couple of really cool new add-ons available as well:

I have to confess I compiled this article in a bit of a hurry and probably missed quite some achievements we have accomplished lately. A good way to get your Vaadin related efforts listed on this monthly wrap-up is to tweet about them with #Vaadin hashtag. If you’re not into tweeting, feel free to hint me by email as well!

 
Matti Tahvonen
Matti Tahvonen
Matti Tahvonen has a long history in Vaadin R&D: developing the core framework from the dark ages of pure JS client side to the GWT era and creating number of official and unofficial Vaadin add-ons. His current responsibility is to keep you up to date with latest and greatest Vaadin related technologies. You can follow him on Twitter – @MattiTahvonen
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