I am currently using Vaadin 6 as a portlet in Liferay. We are planning on getting rid of Liferay and re-create our software as a standalone Vaadin 7 application.
Currently we use the following technologies:
Vaadin
Spring
JPA (Hibernate)
MySQL
EHCache
Jersey Jax-RS
…
I have started digging into creating a new maven vaadin application, using the modular achetype, so I can seperate the backend from the UI from the REST API, etc…
My question is, should I use Spring for the new application? Can I accomplish the same functionality as the old application, with the above technologies without using Spring? Or I guess, what is recommended, creating my Vaadin application with or without Spring?
As you appear to be using JAX-RS and Hibernate, I’d suggest to look into Widlfly (and Java EE 7 stack). You should probably switch EHCache to Infinispan as it it also prodived by default by Wildfly as well. And if you are afraid of Java EE due to its “enterprisy” history, you should look at it again.
Generally I don’t see any good reasons not to use either a modern Java EE server (and services provided by it) or Spring as a basis for your application. They have very well established ways to hook together these commonly used technologies
together and I’d be very surprised if you could connect the pieces better than they do. Although I know very little about hour application and its requirements, my recommendation is to use Vaadin with either Spring or Java EE.