Vaadin standalone

General
1

Hi all,

I am new to vaadin and I am wondering, if it is mandatory to use any existing server with servlets?
Is it (somehow) possible to use vaadin in any selfwritten application to create html-content without the need of a servlet-container?

Thanks a lot in advance,

Thomas

2

Hi,

Vaadin is a web-framework for building rich AJAX interactive applications. It does need to run in a servlet container, but it is possible - and, comparatively, simple - to embed a servlet container in an “normal” java application.

An easy way to do that is using “Winstone” http://code.google.com/p/winstone/ , although it is easy (although a little more work) to do the same with Jetty and Tomcat. Doing thiswould allow you to do “java -jar my-application.jar” which starts an embedded servlet container, deploys your webapplication (and optionally - and for extra points - launches your browser to a dynamically allocated port number!)

However, if you are looking to generate static HTML (e.g. reports, or a simple website), Vaadin isn’t the way to go.

HTH a little,

Cheers,

Charles.

3

I haven’t used WInstone for that, but I have used jetty as an embedded servlet container. In fact if you download the full Vaadin package, not only the jar, you can start it up without installing anything to click around the demos.

4

Hi! Back in history, I made few standalone Vaadin applications using Winstone and
portable Firefox
. Was quite ok to create a “desktop application” like this, but actually I think launching the default browser is more intuitive for the users.

Also for server I’d now go for the embedded Jetty. Winstone was rather slow and Jetty is so well established. There is even a piece of code you can start from which is used in our demos:
http://dev.vaadin.com/svn/releases/6.6.4/src/com/vaadin/launcher/

5

Hi all,

thanks you very much so far for the answers. What is the entry-point into vaadin? We have a very old legacy-appserver, which was customized many times and I just want to try to get vaadin working even without servlets. When I am able to find the entry and have a look, possibly I can change some small things to get it running…

Thomas