Even here in Turku, in the South West coast of Finland, the winter time is finally creeping in. A proper snowfall and sub-zero (°C) temperature days are hopefully just around the corner. Even if the weather is getting colder, the action around Vaadin Designer is only getting hotter.
Impressive release pace
The Vaadin Designer development team has been busy at work. They keep being awesome and have already pushed out the second maintenance release of the designer. Version 1.0.2 brings better handling of themes packaged in jar files, removes exceptions when switching between Edit and Preview modes and improves Outline context menu. The previous maintenance release already fixed a couple of reliability issues. New maintenance releases keep coming out whenever there is something relevant to release.
Tutorials to help you get started
On the tutorial front, the action is not slowing down either. Three weeks ago we blogged about a very useful introduction video of how to build a comprehensive application UI from scratch. The video was paired with a step-by-step tutorial and code samples. This time we want to highlight another tutorial that is building on top of the same application design. In the tutorial called “Connecting your designs to data” we wanted to show you how you can easily hook up your designs to a real data source. The tutorial walks you through implementing an EJB facade, defining an entity repository, and accessing your view designs in order to populate the UI with real data.
In addition to the latest tutorial, the Vaadin Designer page has a bunch of other useful tutorials to help you get started. Check them out! We promise to keep pushing more content out in the coming months. If you have any ideas of what kind of tutorials you would like to see, please give your ideas in the comments section.