In this article series we have mostly covered topics closely related to Vaadin. But we would also love to give more credit about external contributions to the core Vaadin itself. During the past month, Fabian Lange has been really active, almost like working in our R&D team, and also Norman Specht fixed some OSGI issues. The contribution of both Fabian and Norman as well as everybody else contributing to the Vaadin framework is greatly appreciated! You make Vaadin a community effort.
If you’re interested in contributing to Vaadin, recent changes done earlier this month have now made it very simple. You’re done in only four steps without complicated environment setups:
- Clone https://github.com/vaadin/vaadin.git
- Install IvyDE into Eclipse
- Import the project into Eclipse
- Run build/ide.xml
When you have your fix ready, push it to our Gerrit (code review system) and become a Vaadin core contributor - we’ll send you a cool vintage Vaadin t-shirt after your first commit ;)
At the same time, we at Vaadin have grown our R&D team tremendously, as you’ve seen in the previous blog post, to ensure that the framework continues its rapid development.
Sometimes, however, open source projects fade away. This has happened to an OpenID library used by the OpenID Integration add-on. Luckily the folks at Things Prime have published a nice blog entry with a clean example project that uses OpenID authentication with Vaadin 7 - without any add-ons. Check it out if you want simple authentication for your application without inconvenient registration processes.
Now that we crossed the topic of authentication using external services, I’d like to mention OAuth as an alternative to OpenID. OAuth is technically for authorization, but by requesting permission for e.g. email, it can be used for simple authentication as well. Antti Nieminen has written an add-on to simplify OAuth usage with Vaadin 7. There is also an older version for Vaadin 6 available by Marc Englund.
In the Directory, there are a couple of new releases. The most unique of them is definitely JaVaDe by Alec Bigger. It is an online tool that can be used to design Vaadin UI components, without touching a single line of code. A bit like the Visual Designer in the Vaadin Eclipse plugin.
Have a nice summer, I hope your summer weather is as good as here in Finland so that you have time to do some open source coding as well ;-)