Learning online, whenever you want
Are you more a person who likes to take lectures instead of learning things by yourself with a book? Vaadin Ltd offers popular interactive online courses every now and then, but there is also a series of pre-recorded video lessons about Vaadin. The video lessons are built by Mikolaj Olszewski and they might be a decent alternative if you cannot participate in our official on-site or online trainings.
Vaadin in community blogs
Theme building is a common topic that Java developers consider as a tricky task. Rob Gravelle covers the built-in theme options that come in the standard vaadin-themes package. Those can often be more than enough for non-public apps or apps that need no branding at all. My choice, most of the time, is the Valo theme with its standard variables.
Vaadin is super popular in German-speaking Central Europe. Thus I often like to pick some German articles for you to read as well. Holger Herrmann has written a comparison of GXT and Vaadin, discussing how these two Java UI frameworks differ from each other and what their sweet spots are.
Sales dudes in Vaadin, like Marcus Hellberg, haven’t always been sales dudes. Marcus has a strong technical background, with years of experience in Vaadin projects and for his recent presentation in Montreal Vaadin Meetup group, he collected a nice list of tips and tricks for Vaadin projects. Good to read for all new and existing Vaadin users.
And while we are on pro tips, I just recently wrote a blog entry with the title “3 pro tips for Vaadin developers”. I also (once again) covered compression of http payload, which makes your web apps load noticeably faster, and using webjars in Vaadin applications.
The example project of the month
Christoph Frick has set up a really cool base project that uses Vaadin at the UI layer. The programming language used in the project is Groovy and a natural build tool for Groovy projects is Gradle. A part, where this project differs from a typical Groovy project, is that it is not based on the popular Groovy on Grails, but uses a modern Spring stack as its basis. The application is packaged as a jar file with Spring Boot for easy development and cloud deployment.
The project is still using the older unofficial vaadin4spring integration, which is now transforming into an add-on collection in our official Vaadin Spring integration library. I’m sure Christoph would love to accept a pull request with an update to the latest Vaadin Spring integration library ;-)
Highlights from the Directory
The add-on collection for Vaadin just keeps growing and maturing. Each month I feel bad about not covering all the awesome updates that you have been doing to your own and other people’s add-ons. These incremental updates don’t often get the attention they’d deserve. So keep following the vaadin.com/directory weekly to see if some of your favourite add-ons have become better than ever - and let the author know you appreciate the effort. And big thanks to all community members who have been taking good care of their projects!
The completely new add-ons that appeared in the Directory last month are:
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StyleName Finder: Find style names for your Vaadin components from the debug window.
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TableTooltips : Automatic tooltips for Table header and cell contents
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v-leaflet-easyprint: Vaadin wrappers for Leaflet.easyPrint plugin.
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ToggleButton: ToggleButton and ButtonGroup.
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StackPanel Extension for Vaadin: StackPanel is a Panel extension for Vaadin 7