Martin Vaněk is one of many who have recently discovered how awesome a combination Spring Boot and Vaadin make. He has written an excellent blog entry and an example application to use modern stuff like Java 8, Spring Boot, Vaadin, WebSockets and OAuth2 together and he hosts this beast in RedHat’s PaaS service OpenShift. There are so many interesting parts included that this example/blog probably gives a nice answer for many new Vaadiners. E.g. with Websocket based push and OpenShift, the trick is to use a special port 8000 to access your server via front proxy that supports WebSocket communication.
Related to Vaadin and Spring, the recent “Building “Bootful” UIs with Spring Boot and Vaadin” webinar is now publicly available. Check it out and get impressed by how simple it can be to build enterprise grade applications. Also, our very own Maciej Przepióra has started working on “officializing” all the good stuff built within the highly popular vaadin4spring project by Petter Holmström. Be directly in contact with matthew@vaadin.com in case you want to give insights about important features that should exist already in the first release of the official Spring addon for Vaadin. What can you not live without?
If you like to learn by watching videos but are not ready to get into the Spring “magic” or Java EE integration examples, Packt Publishing has some great new stuff for you. Mikołaj Olszewski is hosting an almost full three hours of Vaadin basics for 30USD. Combining that with some hands on exercises is a cheap and comfortable method to get familiar with Vaadin.
The previous month has once again been quite busy for our good old add-on Directory. It is actually currently under a major renewal, so post your enhancement suggestions quickly to directory@vaadin.com in case there is something you’d definitely want to get done.
If I did my math right, we got 10 new add-ons last month. I’m eagerly awaiting for the remaining 10 add-ons for reaching a full 500 add-ons. That tells a nice story about your activity in the community, as 500 is a huge milestone! If you didn’t already watch the webinar about Creating Vaadin Add-ons by Marc Englund and Sami Ekblad, do it now to see how easy it is. During the actual webinar itself, Marc published a cool add-on asked by many of you, namely WebNotifications. With WebNotifications you can ask your end users to subscribe to your web application’s notification stream and e.g. get operating system level notifications once your application has something important available for your user. It can replace email or SMS messages as a notification channel. Previously this has often been custom tailored into applications, but now Vaadiners can just throw this in and save their time for something less generic and be more productive, just the thing people are looking for when choosing Vaadin into their toolbox.
The release of Vaadin TestBench 4 also gave a clear theme for new testing related helpers. I wrote a simple “id setter library” to help implementing PageObject pattern with raw TestBench or Arquillian Drone. It will set valid identifiers for most essential elements in your application, derived from the field name in the source code. Page object pattern really seems to be the way people want to use TestBench. Mathieu Ouellet wrote a related helper that allows you to use the new Vaadin specific selectors introduced in version 4 with the annotations you most probably want to use when implementing PageObject pattern. Great stuff for keeping your tests simple and maintainable!
Some other completely new stuff available in the Directory:
- V-Leaflet-Editable - the best editing features for serious GIS features. Supports e.g. real polygons with holes.
- g-leaflet-editable - plain GWT (client side) wrappers for the above.
- HeaderTags - modifies the “host html page” of Vaadin applications with simple annotations in your UI class.
- ComponentHelp - a simple helper to add integrated help to your Vaadin application
- MongoDB Container Addon - A lazy loading container implementation for the increasingly popular “document database”.
- customwindow - an extension to core Window that supports minimizing the window.
- ColumnLayout - There are never enough custom layouts that do different stuff. Also contains basic theming to make your app fit better in the latest Android versions (aka “material design”).
- cdi-helpers - Contains various helpers for Vaadin CDI users, like a main layout with an automatically populated responsive “Valo Menu”, based on the available views.
Thanks to all of you for creating such wonderful things with Vaadin and making them public. If you have something you’d like to have in the next community spotlight, please add comments below.