Vaadin is a powerful framework that makes developing web applications easy. But as with any technology, getting up to speed can be a challenge, great tutorials notwithstanding. This is why last year, we at Codetrails applied our data-mining expertise, analyzing dozens of example applications, to supply you with Eclipse Code Recommenders models that let you find the correct methods to call with a simple Ctrl+Space. We also compiled a list of helpful code snippets, taken straight out of the Vaadin Sampler, that can be easily searched and inserted into your code with Snipmatch.
These tools were produced in collaboration with the Vaadin team in 2013. But why not take this collaboration to a whole new level in 2014 by including you, the Vaadin users.
With Codetrails Connect, we have the tool to enable entire user communities to share their expertise. Every time you apply a code completion proposal, you implicitly upvote that particular method, endorsing it as an important part of the API. Using Codetrails Connect, this vote is shared with the community and, more importantly, the entire pool of shared knowledge is fed back to you. This enables you to find the important hotspots of any API much faster.
Studies as well as our own data show that the average duration of a code completion session, from the popup of proposals to the selection of a proposal or cancellation, is 27 seconds when working with an unfamiliar API. When doing 100 code completions a day, this sums up to 45 minutes of searching for the right proposal to insert. Imagine how much of that time you could save by having the important information right at the top! Even if you already know a framework like Vaadin inside out, Codetrails Connect makes your life easier since you don’t have to type long prefixes anymore or skip over proposals you already know don’t interest you.
We believe this makes Codetrails Connect the ideal companion for every Vaadin developer. As it turns out, you picked up on this idea even faster than we did. Looking through our usage logs, we discovered that we already have active Vaadin developers sharing with and benefitting from the crowd. In fact, when looking at shared code completion events at a package level, com.vaadin is the third most commonly used, non java.* package!
Click on the chart to get to an interactive sunburst chart of Vaadin events and then take a moment to navigate through it.
It is up to you to make Vaadin number one! We have prepared a live and interactive sunburst chart of code completion events shared by Vaadin users. Looking more deeply at that data, we can see exactly, on what types proposals were selected. As you can see in the chart, code completion was mostly used on types from the ui package, but even for lesser used types, there is data that you can benefit from.
Codetrails Connect is available via the Eclipse Marketplace. In case you haven’t installed our Code Recommenders Vaadin Support feature already and want to try it as well, you can install it by going to Help > Install New Software and entering the URL of our update site.
We hope to see you sharing your knowledge with the community!
Johannes Dorn is a software engineer at Codetrails. His main focus is data-mining with a specialization in snippet mining and all things having to do with extracting knowledge from code.