Vaadin community is huge and growing. There is lots of stuff happening “behind the scenes” that don’t get enough attention among our average users. Thus we have decided to start this new style of article series that will bring up some cool efforts. To keep the story short enough, we’ll never be able to cover everything, but I’m still interested in all the tips for the upcoming episodes.
Those of you who are enthusiastic about Java 8 and strictly structured UI code should definitely check out Nicolas Frankel’s entry in Learning Vaadin blog. He presents how lambda expressions can be used to simplify code using separate event listener objects and Guava event bus.
Continuing on well structured code, you should check out Peter Lehto’s work in progress app stubb. It has a multimodule Maven build, Apache Shiro authentication and MVP structured UI code examples, so it should suit as a nice starting point for even larger apps. If your French is more fluent than mine, you can also continue on the CDI-MVP topic in IP-TECH blog.
I have been helping Peter a bit in his example app. The very first thing I did was to make it look great. The trick was to use the yet to be released Valo theme. I have made a “fork” of the upcoming Valo project that uses sass-maven-plugin to compile the theme. You can check out the project, optionally parametrize it and build with just mvn install - nothing else needed. Then just add the dependency (or drop in the jar to WEB-INF/lib) and annotate your UI with @Theme("dawn"). It works pretty well even with the 7.1 series. The CDI app stub actually gives a much nicer overview of Valo theme than my rudimentary example app.
The add-on count in Directory also keeps growing. My favorite from the latest arrivals is Jarno Rantala’s simple, but yet powerful add-on, Lazy List. It might fill your common requirement in mobile web apps, but it is priceless even for plain “desktop apps”. It allows developers to hook to event when the user scrolls to the end of the view. Most commonly you’d then load stuff to your “eternally scrollable list”. Lots of web apps like Twitter use this approach nowadays. It is now super simple to implement with Vaadin as well.
We’ll be posting these Community Spotlights also in the future. In case you suspect we have missed your efforts, let us know about your activities via Tori or Twitter with the hashtag #Vaadin.