Vaadin Directory is now open. Your are welcome to browse, download and try number add-ons that can make you Vaadin-based applications even better!
Vaadin Directory is all about add-ons to Vaadin Framework. Most notably the add-ons are additional user interface components, but you’ll also find themes, data integration components, tools and other helpers to Vaadin developers. Today, there are already 95 downloadable add-ons in Vaadin Directory - and this is just the beginning.
The key idea has been to make it as simple as possible to extend Vaadin Framework; To package and distribute those extensions as add-ons and especially to make it very simple for the developers to use add-ons. In most cases you just download and drop an add-on jar package in your project and it just works. No other framework bundles both the client-side and the server-side parts of add-on components in such an easy package.
Anyone can create and publish new add-ons easily. For Eclipse users there is even a handy wizard for making the process automatic. You are free to release your add-on with any of the most used Open Source licenses. In addition to that - if you want to - you can also set a (per developer) price for your add-ons and and start selling them. When there is even a mention of money in a context of free open source developer tool, it always raises questions and doubt. If you have any, please ask. I try to answer the questions at the
forums .
And one more thing. We all wish that there will be several hundreds of add-ons by the end of the year. As a thank the future add-on developers who share their creations with the rest of the community,we will give away a number of different gadgets to the best add-ons during the year. First, there will be some free iPads for the best add-ons added to the directory before June. More info will be added after Easter to Vaadin Blog. So ladies and gentlemen, start you IDEs!
Happy Easter and happy experimenting with the new add-ons! Welcome to Vaadin Directory - come and see what the Easter bunny has hidden into
http://vaadin.com/directory .
Although I am still learning Vaadin, but I have decided to work dedicatedly on Vaadin for current and future apps. Now there is an option to sell add-ons too
But I think there needs somewhere a explanation on how to use these components in vaadin applications.
Normally a java developer just drops the jars in the lib directory and then can start using the components.
With vaadin UI jars, this is not the case and searching the forum for a how to results in different approaches, some of them just the opposite of others…
A link/text on the directory page(s) would help newbees find the correct settings for the xml stuff…
Actually - this is the case also with user interface add-on components. I recorded a short tutorial video as an answer to your question and added it to
add-on help page .
(note that as of writing this - youtube servers were still transcoding the video - it will still take a while before HD version of the video is available).
There should be more instructions on how to do that sans eclipse. Everybody doesn’t use eclipse, everybody who uses eclipse may not have access to the vaadin plugin due to some company policies, and you can’t use this methodology when you are using Continuous Integration servers. Then there are those who just want to know what happens behind the scenes
I suggest that the help page would have other sets of similar instructions for other tools - Ant and Maven to start with.
We use netbeans, but just generic instructions on what xml files/settings must be made will be enough. (~10 years of java/netbeans development leaves some traces… )
For the R&D guys benefit, so are we - we use IntelliJ Idea.
FWIW, I am developing new widgetsets in Eclipse, because of the Vaadin tool support; I’m really hopelessly unproductive in Eclipse, though, and am looking forward to
#4420 being progressed…
As for us, our commonly used IDE tool is Netbeans, however we have no explicit restriction on IDE, each developer can select what he/she is productive with. However, we do maintain strict policy for every project - it must be completely buildable and testable from pure ant, without any IDE and with the only single configurable property in a build script - path to JDK.
If there is anyone who has created IntelliJ plugins before, please step up. Contributions to this would be more than welcome as there are no-one in Vaadin R&D who uses IntelliJ and thus #4420 will probably stay in the backlog for a long time… As the
eclipse plugin sources are not too large, cut-n-pasting widget-set building related thing from there to an IntelliJ plugin might be smaller task than it looks - If one is familiar with IntelliJ plugins already.
It should be noted that a lot of the Eclipse plugin code is also related to handling old versions (since IT Mill Toolkit 5.3, before Vaadin) and to non-essential features, as well as automatically updating various files when doing refactorings etc.
If the aim is simply to support easy addition of add-ons to a project and widgetset compilation with the latest Vaadin version, the plugin is likely to be very simple and useful.
Additional features could include configuring a GWT 2.0 development mode “launch” (in Eclipse terminology), creation of e.g. new Vaadin projects from a templates and downloading of new Vaadin (and GWT) versions.
If you do start implementing such a plugin, feel free to contact me for advice on Vaadin related topics and on how the Eclipse plugin works. The same applies to people developing the NetBeans plugin (which currently does not do much) further.
Compiling GWT Widget Sets
[/url] in the Book. The section gives instructions especially for Ant, but its target audience is mainly developers developing custom widgets, not those using them. I’m also not sure how obvious it is to find that section. The section doesn’t mention much about how you combine widget sets in the .gwt.xml descriptor, neither does Section 10.5.
Defining a Widget Set , although I suppose it should. Section 10.8.8 tells how to package widget sets, but not how to use them.
The documentation of each individual add-on should provide some instructions about its use if it is not trivial (just drop in the Jar), but there seems to be need also for some generic documentation on using component add-ons that introduce new widgets.
I fully agree with this observation. I, myself, have gone through these areas of the documentation several times to see how a non-eclipse developer + user can create/deploy/use custom widgets. It is not that clear.
However, I have to admit that vaadin is one of the best documented application framework I have seen.
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