Extending Vaadin Applications

Hi,

I am pretty new to vaadin and have been spending some time for few weeks now getting to know and use vaadin better. I had a question related to extensibility of vaadin applications. By extensibility i mean can vaadin applications for example be developed as web-fragments as allowed in servlet 3.0 specifications ? As an explanation in terms of use case it is like: For Ex. A base vaadin application is written without knowing much about possible future functionality that would be added and as and when a new use case pops up a new vaadin fragment could be written and the base application would extend it and use it.. Like lets say the AddressBook demo app as a base application did not have the search implemented; but later at some point of time can AddressBook app extend a new vaadin implementation of search ?

If there are any ways of implementing extensibility in vaadin applications please do let me know and also if vaadin applications can be extended using web-fragments and OSGI bundle fragments ?

Thanks & Regards
Vijay

Sure, take a look at this link. Not familiar with web fragments, so can't help you there.

Web fragments can add new servlets and servlet mappings etc. to a WAR. However, a Vaadin application is typically running as a single servlet so web fragments are not a very practical way to extend a Vaadin application.

OSGi can be used to extend the functionality of a Vaadin application, even dynamically at run-time. See e.g. Kai's blog post linked from this article and this older but more extensive blog post.

For a somewhat more complete framework for certain types of applications combining Vaadin, OSGi and more, see redVoodoo.