I discovered
Vaadin
…I fall in love.
Now I have a dream…Vaadin as
SmartGWT
(only one developer:
Sanjiv
, one year and
+260 samples
) and as ExtJS in
visual
wealth.
It will be perhaps in the next
Vaadin 8.0
There are already a lot of interesting custom components in contrib and incubator. I think, after Directory launch, they’ll get organized in more natural way in a directory and become noticable by everyone.
I think the Directory estimated release date is end of March.
About the samples: I think that
demo.vaadin.com/sampler
already has a reasonable amount of code samples. If that is what your looking for?
In addition to that, I had the dream having even more small samples/tips running online, and created
uilder.virtuallypreinstalled.com
. It is meant to be a easy hosting place for simple examples, live tests and code sharing. The idea is that you write and run Vaadin/Java samples online - without any deployment.
Why people are looking more for
ExtJS
and
ExtGWT
than for
Vaadin
?
I think, and it’s just my opinion, only for two reasons:
1- The look and feel. (ExtJS is the best one)
2- The number of examples.
If IT Mill takes care over the components look and feel (in depth, not just css themes), (must have a specialist dedicated to the info art design) and multiply the native optimized components number, I’m sure that Vaadin will be the first used Framework in the world.
[color=#8F8F8F]
sorry for my bad english
[/color]
To my mind, Reindeer has better look than ExtJs. And it much better understandable in terms of tweaking the theme (Im not saying about tweaking colors only).
There are two points for ExtJS:
-
Number of people are looking for pure-js solutions - Vaadin will not compete here
-
ExtJS has a bit more built-in components than Vaadin. Hopefully, this will be reflected with the Directory, but I think, we really need to make some voting and include several most interesting components into the core widgetset, after Directory launch, of course.
Personally - we’ve used ExtJS inside GWT in previous product. There are real problems with performance when you’re going to manipulate the large datasets on the client side, so one should code very carfeully in order not to stuck with this. Another is more standard look-n-feel, you have (to my mind) apply much more efforts in Ext for making a really custom look in comparison to Vaadin. Unfortunately, this usually understandable only after some time of experience with both 
Also, having really large extJS+GWT application (like we did) really hurts in terms of debugging - hosted mode does not work well due to complexity of app and GWT translation time is too large.
So as conclusion from my point of view - Vaadin is the best in it’s market now, but we really need to have more core client-side widgets in some time - when you got rid of GWT translation process it is hard to return back So, avoiding GWT recompilation as much as possible would be a great thing.
P.S. From my side Im currently in process of making a widgetset manager app, just to solve the question in previous paragraph. It will allow to build customized versions of Vaadin.jar file with repackaged default widgetset to allow build profiles on a web and provision a custom vaadin distributions - just to get rid of GWT stuff on the project side. But… that’s a sneak preview of a topic for March or April actually
Really good points. Please add any important features missing from Vaadin (but included in some strong competitor) to dev.vaadin.com. We’ll try (really hard) to make and keep Vaadin the best RIA framework for Java-developers and to listen to your feature requests.
That being said, there are couple of things not yet mentioned in the above discussions:
- Most components in the directory will have live demos. This will increase the amount of online demos by several dozens immediately when the directory is launched.
- There is already a really good designed in Vaadin team (Jouni) and he is working on
another full-featured flexible theme
for Vaadin
+1000 for last sentence - Jouni rocks !
And as for the ropic - Vaadin is really the first framework with carefully designed look-n-feel from the beginning. This really matters for the new users (Remembering me a number of years ago, when I just accidently found a link to ITMill in one blog - on of the main reasons (in additions to “server-side” and “gwt” words), caused me to stay on that side was the Runo theme.
That is, unfortunately, confusing. From across the ocean, we cannot quite figure out what uilder is, what virtuallypreinstalled is, and how all these things relate to vaadin, it mill and one another. The ecosystem is not explained anywhere.
I think you need to bring everything back under the vaadin branding, otherwise things are perceived as fragmented.
community.vaadin.com is fine if you don’t want to bless community Friday projects with Corporate support status.
community.vaadin.com could be a lot better name than virtuallypreinstalled.com, which predates Vaadin.
Bit of a background: Virtuallypreinstalled started as an internal experiment on making it easier for everyone at IT Mill to demo their projects and add-ons. One future development possibility has been to be able to provide the same experimentation environment for larger part of vaadin community (now only a handful of virtuallypreinstalled servers are used by people who do not work for IT Mill). We did not develop this further yet as Google AppEngine partially solves the problem. Would you think that there would be need for larger part of community for their “own” virtual servers for demoing Vaadin -related stuff?
GAE has too many limitations. Ideally, community is a portal, and behind it are a few well-known web servers – Tomcat, JBoss, and GAE where a war can be dropped.
Agreed.
Currently virtuallypreinstalled is implemented as a pile of preconfigured openvz linux instances. The “owner” has root access to his server and can just scp war to tomcat directory. This is really flexible - “owner” can install another jvm, server, database, … if he needs to while the servers are well isolated from each other.
If you would like to have such a server for Vaadin demos, just let me know.
As Joonas already explained, virtuallypreinstalled.com has been the playground for Vaadin apps since 2007. It was created to solve one of the most obvious blocker for good demo applications to exist: easy Java deployment environment. Everyone working at IT Mill (and few outside) to have an own place to deploy Vaadin apps.
Uilder, on the other hand, was something I personally needed for sharing/testing code snippets and samples, and I just leveraged the easiest deployment option for that. The uilder “branding” is just something wanted to test my creativity with …
We are also working on to showcase demos (or production applications) better at vaadin.com. At some extent this should solve the fragmentation issue. Stay tuned for that.
It certainly has. It is best for simple write-/read-through applications that can benefit from the stateless server.