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Setting up your add-on project

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Joonas Lehtinen
Joonas Lehtinen
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On Feb 4, 2012 6:21:00 PM
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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.

Joonas Lehtinen
Joonas Lehtinen
Joonas is the CPO and co-founder of Vaadin. He has been working with web app development tools and technologies for over 20 years and speaks frequently in Java conferences around the world. Joonas lives is San Jose, CA, with his wife and 10 year old son. You can follow him on Twitter – @joonaslehtinen
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