Lots of things have happened for Vaadin users after the summer holidays. There have been many official releases, mostly built around Vaadin 7.3 and the new Valo theme engine. We even titled September as the “Month of Valo” with, among others, JAXenter.de covering the release and More Vaadin writing about Easy theming with Valo. Also, TouchKit 4 is finally out and the long awaited Vaadin CDI helper has upgraded to beta maturity level. But also you have been very active.
Although Vaadin is for building UIs, there are never enough good quality “full stack examples”. In a modular era of software development, it is all about how different libraries fit together and Madura is a Java library for creating self-validating Java objects with dynamic metadata. Madura combines their back end technology with Vaadin UIs and creates a variation to the well known Pizza Shop example. A cool example app with both mobile and desktop optimized views!
During the summer, CodeCentric also published a couple of nice blog entries about Vaadin. Daniel Reuter documents different @Push modes in an excellent recap. Fabian Lange discusses using CDI without a full Java EE server and how to work around some push related issues. Since the recent releases of Vaadin CDI, “server push” should now work out of the box, but the former tip is still perfectly valid.
There are also lots of other new utilities and releases in the Directory. You’ll find a few of them below, but be sure to follow @vaadindirectory on Twitter to get notified of new add-ons and releases.
Sebastian Rothbucher from Aquinet has packaged a nice HTML5 input add-on which will give you the possibility to utilize these inputs on desktop as well as in mobile. Try it out if you want a “native” number field or try MediaElementsJs player if you wish to use HTML5 video or audio tags with a nice UI.
I know you have probably written at least a few ad-hoc XML containers for your Vaadin application. Luckily now Saif Eddine JERBI has created a re-usable library for that. No more boilerplate code for your XML+Vaadin apps!
Using Scala to build Vaadin UIs seems to become even more popular – which is no surprise. And to make it more fluent, us Scala coders now have another approach available as an alternative to Scaladin. Instead of wrapping components, Rinne by Lukasz Byczynski just extends Vaadin components to add more Scala like APIs. Check it out if you are interested in Scala development. Time will tell which approach will become more popular, but it is certain that competition will create better tools for Scala users.
Last but not least, the new Vaadin Community Survey is out. Please help us by answering the survey below: