Hello from New Zealand — and a Vaadin Gantt chart component

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Hi everyone,

I’m Christopher, a Java developer based in Taranaki, New Zealand — home to the beautiful Mount Taranaki. I’ve been writing Java since 2001, having started my coding journey in the 1980s on a Commodore 64 and working through C along the way. In my work I place a lot of weight on robust data modelling and intuitive UI design. I’m relatively new to Vaadin but have thoroughly enjoyed getting to grips with it — it’s a refreshingly different way to build web UIs.

Which brings me to why I’m here. I recently built OptoGantt — a commercial Gantt chart component library with native editions for Vaadin, Spring Boot, Jakarta Faces, and Apache Tapestry.

The Vaadin edition is a proper Vaadin component built entirely in Java — GanttChart extends Div, GanttFilterPane uses DateTimePicker and ComboBox, and the filter pane communicates with the server via WebSocket push rather than AJAX. No JavaScript widgets, no iframes.

I’ve written a comprehensive quick-start guide covering installation, bar construction, the Builder pattern, GanttFilterListener wiring, AppShellConfigurator with @Push, i18n via ResourceBundle, and colour theming. There’s a live interactive demo on the home page and a cut-down example at the top of the guide so you can see exactly what you’ll be building before you start.

If you’re looking for a Gantt chart that feels native to Vaadin rather than bolted on, I’d love to know what you think: OptoGantt Quick-Start Guide — Vaadin

Happy to answer any questions here — and if anyone wants to say hello, I’m also on LinkedIn.

Christopher.

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Hi,

Looks promising and I’ll check it out for sure.

One important thing: you should consider publishing the project to Maven Central
https://central.sonatype.org/publish/publish-portal-maven/

Otherwise it’s hard to use especially in the CI/CD pipeline

1 Like
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Hi Simon,

Thank you — really appreciated! And a great point about Maven Central. I’ve been looking into private Maven repository options and GitHub Packages looks like a clean solution — developers would receive a Personal Access Token giving them direct dependency resolution without the manual JAR install step.

I’ll look to have this in place fairly soon.

By the way, great to have discovered Vaadin when I was researching which Java web frameworks to port OptoGantt across to. I’ll definitely be looking to explore Vaadin some more in future projects!

Kind regards,

Christopher.