My background is a world-wide company with European based servers and clients around all over the world.
We currently use GWT (last version) extensively for our back office web applications.
We’ll now start a round of new web back offices to be used world-wide, and I’ve seen a lot of vibe around Vaadin 7 + GWT.
What exactly do I have to win to move for this solution, instead of using pure GWT??
From my naive point of view (studying Vaadin architecture for the past days) Vaadin provide a thin client opposing to the GWT fat clients… Does any one has the experience of serving Vaadin web application around the world, and if it works OK, or if it lags because of network issues?
Thanks in advance for all the help, discussion, and lets see if I get convinced to move to this solution
It also integrates databinding, showing/transfering only parts of datasets to the client etc.
No need to implements rest/soap or whatever to bind GWT to the server backend
I think the question was about only using the gwt classes inside Vaadin, in comparison to pure GWT. Your question answers more why use Vaadin instead of GWT.
As you may or may not know, Google has moved the ownership of GWT away from solely Google, to a commitee that steers GWT development. Google is one member of the commitee. Vaadin is another. There are plenty more.
Here are some reasons to pop into mind about why you may enjoy using Vaadin’s GWT over pure GWT. I’m in no sense an expert on the issue.
You can buy support from the Vaadin team to your project in cases where you need an expert to solve the issue (commercial)
With a Vaadin Pro account, you can report bugs to Vaadin and mark them as bug fix priority. The Vaadin team will fix the bug in GWT and release a new version. (commercial)
Vaadin components consists of three parts. Server-side, client-side and connector. The client-side part is a gwt component with no dependencies to Vaadin, so you can freely use those in your GWT projects.
You can use other features in the framework like SASS support.
If you at some point want to start using the server side of Vaadin as well somewhere down the project, they are there, ready to be imported.
There might be something I forgot but that’s a start. I think Vaadin will offer more to pure GWT development down the road as the new combination matures. The link André referred to has some additional info.
… and to clarify this (my personal point of view, not an official statement): the option to mark an issue as “bugfix priority” and immediate access to pre-compiled Vaadin builds with the latest fixes are parts of the commercial product Vaadin Pro Account, but the resulting fixes will be in an open source code repository and will be contributed back to the stand-alone GWT branch (either immediately or after a small delay, depending on technical and administrative factors).
A major advantage of the Vaadin version (that will be implemented gradually, as each component is reworked) is the set of widgets Vaadin provides in addition to the standard GWT widgets.
I would also expect the Vaadin version of GWT to include a number of fixes to some bugs that have been causing us or others headaches - these will eventually also make it to the standalone GWT. In addition, the Vaadin version may include better integration of some development and debugging tools.
I’ve seen the security issues, and I can see the point!
Also I believe the new widgets and support for GWT would be a great thing for the community.
I also hope that in future we might be mixing GWT and server side Vaadin widgets for having the best in two worlds.
For what I’ve been reading also the migration should be easy…surely I’ll be looking into this the following days.
One final doubt that really is important for me in the debate for fat/thin client is the possible lagging between a user do some action on the interface and getting the results.
Mainly because these applications would be served also for the other side of the world, where connectivity may fail intermittently and network round trip will take some time.
I assume that the server side model is much more communication demanding comparing to pure GWT. Or may I feel secure on this?
Is there any study or benchmark on this, opposing to client side model?
