After the rainy start, it has been a beautiful summer here in Finland. We have been enjoying our holidays and sailing a lot in the beautiful Finnish archipelago. But like all nerds, we wanted to collect data too. And for this purpose we created a small tracker application for our boats. This shows nicely how little code you need for a full-stack Java web app these days with Spring Boot and Vaadin. GPS+GSM dongle sends data to the server, persists it to a JPA data store, and a very simple Vaadin TouchKit application visualizes the data on a map.
John has also been one of the active guys during the summer. He recently released a new pre-release version of the Vaadin Gradle plugin that can be used to build Vaadin projects, including the widgetset compilation and running development mode. His latest effort is to build full Groovy support into it. A pretty natural step for a Gradle plugin :-)
If you are bored with plain old Ant(+ IVY), philosophically against Maven, and don't want to learn Gradle either, the Java ecosystem has build tools to choose from. SBT is used by several Scala enthusiasts and there is a Vaadin plugin for that too. Take a look at Henri’s Vaadin SBT plugin. It provides a similar toolset to build widgetsets and themes and supports both Java and Scala.
Our German friends at Akquinet have been creating low-level wrappers for HTML5 inputs for Vaadin. Pretty similar to some field components that come with Vaadin TouchKit. Although several HTML5 inputs are essential on touch devices, they are quite handy on modern desktop browsers as well.
And when you are building mixed mobile-desktop Vaadin applications, there is a good article by Duong Linh on how to make them co-exists in the webapp. There are some tricks that make it easier to create seamless UX across devices.
During the last couple of years, I have been sorry to tell numerous people that I have no personal motivation to complete the upgrade of OpenLayers Wrapper for Vaadin 7. The reason has been that I have turned to use Leaflet myself. Finally, I'm really happy to announce that there is now a sponsored project that will implement Vaadin 7 wrappers for the new modernized OpenLayers 3 project. Matti Hosio from Vaadin Ltd is leading the initial effort. He is currently on vacation, but he would surely appreciate all contributions, including early testing, via the github project.
Btw, if you are looking for some random inspiration, try searching Vaadin projects in Google Code, GitHub or SourceForge. There are a lot of interesting open source projects and small protos out there, like the full featured olympic weightlifting system by Jean-François Lamy. Vaadin is used to submitting results during competitions and showing it live on screens at the arena.