Hi,
Firstly, thanks all at Vaadin for producing an amazing tool, and even more so for the addon contributors for doing such an amazing job to extend Vaadin in so many useful ways.
Secondly, I’m relatively new to Vaadin, so if my comments are already handled elsewhere, forgive the duplication, but if they are, they are not very visible, to me at least.
Lastly, I’m not sure where to put these ideas, so for lack of a better place, I’m putting them here.
Here are my suggestions:
- Provide an update e-mail option when an addon you’re using gets updated
- Have some form of standard addon package naming structure
For the first point, I think it would be very useful to be able to “subscribe” to an addon, so if it is updated we can either get an e-mail, or equally good, a message next time we sign on that these addons have been updated.
This comes from the fact that any resonably sized webapp will use quite a few addons, I’m averaging about 5-6 “must haves” for all applications and then specific addons for given sites needs.
On the second point, I would suggest just like Addons are “Certified, Stable, Experimental, etc.” there should be some form of agreed convention of package naming. Some developers do: org.vaaddin.addon. some do org.vaadin. some give the addon completely different names.
This makes it very hard to pull in the right imports when coding. I generally import specifically each class I use, since from way back when that was the recommended approach for efficiency of memory and execution. Eclipse does a great job of figuring out what to import, but even so, it is not “professional” in feel. Just my hang up I guess, but it makes Vaadin look more fragmented than it first appears.
Given the consistency of the Vaadin API, it is quite at odds that the addon standards are not so well defined. Just like the JavaBean “standard” is a coding convention you can follow or not, the same goes on here. The easy way to build awareness of the standard is simply to parse the Addon being uploaded and if it does not meet the standard package structure, ask the developer if they wish to proceed. This will help newer developers to adopt the standard.
Hope these ideas help,
Anthony
PS I’m really enjoying how much more productive I am with Vaadin compared to other web frameworks