newbie Vaadin questions !

Hello Everyone,

First of all, I am quite excited about Vaadin after reading the fact that I can write both server-side and client-side with Java only and all the communication between client and server is optimized. This is a major life saver, I just wish I had discovered Vaadin a year earlier ! It would have saved me so much trouble.

So far, I was building with perl + php (CI) + Javascript (Jquery) + Jruby…after 5 months of non-stop development, and never ending quantity of bugs, I was completely burnt out when I realized my UI only works on Firefox. Very little time actually went into application and business logic. Most of the time was consumed with building the UI, making client and server talk. Server was a problem too as it ran on LAMP stack, which meant I had to configure Apache and read lot of tutorials on Linux.

So enough chat, here’s my questions:

  1. Eclipse plugin or Netbean plugin ? (Could you use a GUI builder like Netbean’s Matisse to design RIA ? )
  2. Cross-Domain Javascripting (How could I embed a browser in UI, which allows access to any URL’s DOM, and manipulate it ?) Don’t really feel like paying $1000 for Jxbrowser… http://www.teamdev.com/jxbrowser/index.jsf
  3. Is this forum written on Vaadin ?
  4. What does Vaadin mean ?
  5. What is a good free/paid hosting for my Vaadin projects ?

The Eclipse plugin is “official”, while the NetBeans plugin is a separate project and quite basic at the moment - we’re hoping to squeeze in some time for the NetBeans plugin sometime soon, though.
For Eclipse, we’re working on a visual editor (I’m working on it right now). I’m assuming it will be ported to NetBeans in the future (it’s designed to be fairly easy to port).
But right now, and probably still for some time, the Eclipse plugin is way ahead.

There could be solutions for some specific cross-domain tasks, but since you’re asking for an all-purpose solution: not out of the box.
You can easily embed an iframe, but cross domain restrictions apply. We’re all waiting for JWebPane to make all kinds of awesome weirdness possible, but its future is currently unknown… Another possible solution would be to make a custom browser with Adobe AIR and integrate with that, though this will require some coding (it would make a nice add-on, though :slight_smile:

No, this is the forum implementation that comes with Liferay. We’re not in the forum-making-business, although sometimes I wish we were…

Two things: “Female reindeer” in (finnish) Sami language, “I demand” (as in “I demand better user interfaces”) in Finnish.
But increasingly, it’s taking on the meaning “great UI library for java webapps”, in all languages… (ok, I admit there is a slight chance I might be a tiny bit biased… :wink:

Hard questions since it depends on your needs; Amazon EC2 is awesome and can be configured to suit, but you have to know how to administer it, and it’s not free. Google AppEngine comes at a super price-point, and requires less configuring, but has some restrictions (and possible latency issues due to serialization - depending on your requirements - tough it scales well). Generally, any Java Servlet hosting solution should be possible. I know eatj has been used as an affordable solution as well. YMMV

Best Regards,
Marc