Have you ever started "new Vaadin Widget" wizard, hacked together a nice component and in the end wondered how exactly should I have set up this project? I am sure you have - and you are not alone.
The common questions are almost endless:
- How to automate the build of the widget?
- How to use Maven for the build?
- How to debug the widget?
- How to make the development cycle really fast and avoid deployment and GWT compilation steps?
- How to push the results to GitHub (or some other public repository)?
- And so on...
To make the process really easy, I decided to write down the exact steps for setting up the add-on project environment for my favorite toolchain. The result is a HOWTO type tutorial in the wiki. I hope this wiki page will stay updated in the future while new versions for the tools are published.
The goals of the project setup were:
- Fully automated build with Maven
- Allow anyone to re-build your project easily regardless of the IDE:s
- Almost instant save-build-deploy-try cycle
- Simple, but complete, project setup
- Project publishing to GitHub
- Easy publishing of the results to Vaadin Directory
Go take a look of the HOWTO, set up your add-on project with these simple steps and start publishing new widgets to Vaadin directory.