A group of developers independently organized a training program on the Vaadin framework and I'd like to share my experience with this group. Their intention was to spread knowledge of Vaadin in their region, and to hire 3 new developers for their company. I'm talking about the guys at Zero11–a company based in Turin, Italy that develops eCommerce software solutions based on Vaadin. They designed a comprehensive set of lectures that progressively teaches everything you need to become productive with Vaadin.
The program included 10 full-time daily sessions on the following topics:
- What is Vaadin? Basic introduction
- Vaadin terminology
- Standard Vaadin application architecture
- How to design a Vaadin application
- Routing
- What are Vaadin components and how to manage them
- Layout components
- Vaadin layout with specific features
- Form management and data binding
- Grid and data list
- Vaadin theme management (with CSS and SASS basics)
- Default and custom themes
- Component layout and styling
- Basic introduction to Polymer
- Web components creation with Polymer
- How to deploy a Vaadin application
You can find the repository with the examples developed during the learning sessions on GitHub.
I was invited to give a lecture on background processing and Server Push with the WebSocket protocol. During the lecture, we learned how the Java ecosystem provides a wide range of libraries, frameworks, patterns, technologies, and tools, to boost professional business application development. As I’m sure you are aware, Java is still the most used language. Just look who is first in the latest TIOBE index:
During my lecture, we also covered topics on how Vaadin handles HTTP requests, how to customize the bootstrap page that is returned during the first HTTP request to the application, how and when client-side events are queued before being sent to the server, what polling and long polling is, and how to activate, configure, and use Server Push to modify the UI from separate threads.
If you want to try the coding exercise we developed during the lesson, take a look at this repository.
Thanks to the amazing people at Zero11 for organizing this academic program and for your hospitality during my stay in Turin. I'm definitely looking forward to meeting you again during the next edition of the course.
If you are interested in organizing your own events on Vaadin topics, let me know and we'll figure out ways to collaborate. Looking forward to discussing your ideas!