In the end of 2013 we ran a survey on vaadin.com to learn more about how we all as the community are currently using Vaadin, and what do people love and hate about it. We got over 200 responses and here is what we know now.
Professional Vaadin users
We are a professional open-source community. When it comes to Vaadin, 70% of the users make their living from application development and only 20% consider themselves more like hobbyists.
Geographically it looks like we are everywhere - from Portland to Zürich, from Tokyo to São Paulo.
In the context of
In addition to Vaadin itself, what else is out there? Well, if you try to put this into one sentence, you could say something like: Vaadin is used together with JPA, CDI, I18N, and Maven with CI. Plus coffee and add-ons, of course.
Latest versions
Vaadin users are still mostly early-adopters and version 7.1 is in use in nearly 70% of the cases. This comes as a bit of a surprise as usually business applications evolve slowly and the latest version is less important. On the other hand - practically nobody uses nightly builds.
Using IDEs
I guess everybody uses an IDE of some kind. We have invested a lot in Eclipse in the past and this shows in the statistics. The majority of our users chooses Eclipse over any other IDE. NetBeans and IntelliJ share the rest. Cloud based IDEs are still completely missing.
Your hopes and wishes
I guess we guessed the most popular ones already - more widgets and better performance. These are the two things that we can never have enough of. The good news is that we are constantly working on these, and for example the upcoming Grid widget is one of the coolest efforts.
Following Vaadin
You are reading this blog and so are many others. The most popular vaadin channels come as no surprise to us: this Blog, discussion forum and the Vaadin newsletter. These are exactly the ones we continue to invest in, but you’ll also see more online videos and webinars from us in the future.
“Wow, you rock, great product!”
Based on the feedback I dare to say we have a pretty good Java web framework. Of course there are continuously more things to do, but if 91% would recommend Vaadin, we must have done something right.
Overall, an open-source framework is more like a reflection of its users. That “thank you for a good framework” actually goes to you all: keep up the good work!
Sami Ekblad has been working at Vaadin Ltd since 2000. He has had various roles from Vaadin R&D to large-scale Java EE application development, project management and Vaadin community management. You can follow him on Twitter – @samiekblad