Opinions on how to add some sort of "corporate news channel" to a Vaadin app?

General
1

I’ve gotten a vague request to add a “corporate news channel” to our vaadin app.
The goal is to maintain it outside the app and make it available to several instances.

I don’t think the app needs to interact with the content other than to display it, though I might need to know if there is new content

Any opinions on which tools to use to produce such a feed, and how to embed it in Vaadin?

2

Would you like to build it by your own or do you only want to embed an external system?

Without deeper knowledge i would create a view for “Authors” who can add and edit news and a view for showing up the latest news. Maybe kind of “cards”

3

I assume they’ll want a proper wysiwyg editor, image upload, clickthrough metrics etc, so using some ready made 3rd party authoring system seems the way to go.

Not sure what is best for displaying in the app.
One possibility is something with an rss feed that I can loop over and generate cards.
Another possibility is something that gives me the finished inner html
Not sure if I want a finished html page in an iframe, but that is an option too.

4

Maybe the external system has an API?

5

Sure :smiley:, but for now everything is undefined. I just wanted to investigate options. If there is something that is better/worse than something else, I might be able to steer them in a sensible direction.

For now I’ve added GitHub - rometools/rome: Java library for RSS and Atom feeds, loop over the feed entries and add html cards for each. It is at least an ok proof of concept

6

Do you have external system that already produces feed of “corporate news” that you want to subscribe and show in your Vaadin app or is your Vaadin application going to be the system where it is authored and maintained?

7

There are also headless CMS systems, where content writers can author various types of content, and different applications can then fetch the content from an API as JSON and render it in whatever way is appropriate for that specific app.

8

Everything is still vague, so I was just trying to get a sense of what was possible / sensible.
Reading and displaying an RSS feed worked fine, but I’ve parked this for now until the requirements are clearer.

9

Yes, then there are multiple answers

  • You can build full master UI to Vaadin application to manage such things using e.g. RTE component or TinyMCE add-on. Naturally you need some business logic, which is out of scope of the UI framework. Probably you need ways to publish the news to other systems.

  • You can add REST end point aside Vaadin application where to POST updates from other system. Then use application scope EventBus to relay the data to Vaadin view. Rudimentary example here: cdi-demo/src/main/java/org/vaadin/cdidemo at master · TatuLund/cdi-demo · GitHub

  • You can embed corporate news page from other place using IFrame and show it inside Vaadin view.

And naturally there are many variations on these.