Vaadin is one of the most used Java frameworks for the web today. In our effort of bridging the gap from HTML to Java backends, we constantly investigate new technologies that make sense for web developers. Now, there are two early works available in Vaadin Labs that you might want to try separately.
Vaadin Components for JavaScript developers
First, we decided to release some early work on web components to hear your thoughts about them.
For those who don’t know about it yet, Web Components is a new promising initiative to make HTML more reusable. Templates, Shadow DOM, Custom Elements and HTML Imports enable you to build and distribute HTML and JavaScript components easier than before.
Vaadin Components not only is a way of using Vaadin Components from plain HTML and JS, but it also includes bindings for AngularJS and an API for GWT. Using Vaadin Components is pretty straight-forward: including vaadin-components.js on your page, or alternatively using Bower and HTML imports. You might not even need to download the package as you could just include the script from the newly opened cdn.vaadin.com.
Released today, Slider, ProgressBar and Grid are available as a Vaadin Components 0.1 package in Vaadin Labs. While there are only a few components available at this point, we encourage all JavaScript enthusiasts to take a look, test them out and let us know what you think about them. Have fun!
Elements for Java developers
Secondly, we didn’t leave the Java developers with empty hands either. There is also a new API for Vaadin Framework users to try out: The Vaadin Elements API.
This is a low level API for accessing web component elements (or actually any DOM elements) directly from your Vaadin application. Like the work on web components, this is still experimental, but it still can be useful for those looking for a way to integrate web components into their Vaadin application.
Vaadin Labs going strong
Vaadin Labs is getting more attention. In addition to these two new Labs-projects, you can also find the pre-release of Vaadin Designer over there.
While the idea is that not all Vaadin Labs products might ever get officially released or be part of the framework, they might still be useful for many Vaadin users. And there most probably is a reason to why we’ve built them to begin with.
Let us know what you think, and stay tuned for more!