Directory renewal is getting closer.
In last month’s episode, we didn’t discuss about the Directory or traditional Vaadin add-ons at all. So lets start with some news about the upcoming Directory renewal. We have just deployed a new version of the preview, now with a fully featured administration console.
Add-on authors can already use it to add icons to their add-ons and spice up their descriptions and release notes with Markdown syntax. We think icons will be a great way to help people recognise their favourites and rich text formatting is a big aid for those who consider the directory page as their project’s homepage.
Although, you should note that it works with the same database as the public side. New icons will show up only in the preview version and possible markdown formatting will show up as raw text on the old side. If you find any oddities or improvement ideas, please, report them via the “Give Feedback” button on the top of the Directory preview.
JVx Application Framework generates you a Vaadin UI for web, Swing for desktop
In this article series we have referred lots of content from SibVisions’s blog that relate to Vaadin. This months highlight is definitely a nice video of a Vaadin UI controlling window shutters.
In case somebody has missed it, one of the reasons for their constant feed of Vaadin articles is their Apache 2 licenced UI toolkit called JVx Application Framework. With it you can build your UI just once and deploy it to web, mobile and desktop. JVx runs its web UI on Vaadin, its desktop UI on Swing and its mobile UI as native Android or iOS apps.
Jvx is definitely a tool to check out for those who need to maintain the same application on both web and desktop. To get a better understanding of what Jvx can do, you can check out this article and the included video that introduces their upcoming Java FX support.
BTW. Related to Swing, we are currently preparing some material for developers coming to Vaadin from a Swing background. If you have experiences you’d like to share or tips about topics we should handle, feel free to contact me via email. I’d appreciate all insights, it is way too long since I wrote my first Vaadin app to remember what I felt difficult - and I haven’t worked with Swing since.
Wiki page for Vaadin related OS projects
Helper libraries like Jvx and vaadin4spring, which we discussed in the last episode, don’t fit into the Directory that well and might not get the publicity they’d deserve in Vaadin community. Thus I decided to create a new page for this kind of projects to the wiki. I created a separate category for various examples like technology integrations. I quickly filled in some projects, but there are lots of good stuff missing. Don’t hesitate to add links and short description to other projects. Lets make this a shared bookmark collection of Vaadin related OS projects.
Lots of Directory activity
Since we crossed the boundary of 500 add-ons we have had an insane activity in the Directory. Since the beginning of the year, there are 13 completely new add-ons and 43 different add-ons have celebrated new releases already during 2015. Big thanks to all active add-on contributors!
Completely new add-ons to the Directory during 2015:
- custommenubar - A MenuBar named as CustomMenuBar and MenuItems are having close/remove button.
- FieldArithmetics Add-on - Arithmetic field extension.
- Ritch text to Open office dokument - This add-on converts Vaadin RichTextArea formatted text to OpenOffice document with a few formatting options.
- Elements Add-on - Elements is an experimental WebComponent and HTML element API for Vaadin 7.4.
- GooglePicker for Vaadin - Google Picker integration for Vaadin. Choose files from Google Drive.
- CriteriaBuilder - UI to create SQL “Where” criterias or Container’s Filters.
- ResizableCssLayout Add-on - Makes CssLayout resizable with drag and drop from all sides and corners.
- Viritin - What apache-commons and Guava libraries does for Java, Viritin does it for Vaadin.
- Lazy Paged Container - A lazy paged container for minimal bandwidth.
- Vaadin Spring - First development release of official Vaadin Spring integration. The vaadin4Spring project will use this in its upcoming versions.
- Plupload wrapper for Vaadin 7.x - Plupload library integration add-on for Vaadin Framework 7.x.
- LambdaConverter - Allows the use of lambda expressions as converters - Java 8 only.
- Vaadin Spreadsheet - Spreadsheet component for business applications.