For a long time we have had doubts about the name “IT Mill Toolkit”. It just have not sounded as easy to communicate and cool as we would have liked. Most of the people we have asked advised us to just change the name. Finally, we have found a new name!
The name has been selected to be short, simple to write and easy to pronounce. It should be unique enough to be easily found with Google and give us a good basis to build on. The word originates from a Finnish word “vaadin” that means (female) reindeer. In Finnish, “vaadin” also means “I demand”. So you could say “Vaadin parempia käyttöliittymiä!” - “I demand better user interfaces!”
The new name will be used for 6.0 version to be released by JavaOne 2009.
Is there going to be a general pronunciation guideline for the name, or is it up to each person to pronounce it however she wants?
As a poor man’s pronunciation guide, “Vaadin” sounds like vuh-din (emphasis on first syllable, the long ‘a’:s sound like the ‘a’ in “ago”) in Finnish, while many English-speakers might pronounce it like vay-din.
Regarding the Vaadin - in Russian it sounds very close to one commonly used men name - Vadim.
In common, the new name does not raise any misunderstanding and seems to be more to neutral. I’ll ask more colleagues next week to acquire their feeling on this new name.
Well, in Portuguese, “Vaadin” sounds strange but doesn’t mean anything. One possible issue is that the common Brazilian people is very creative and joker by nature, and they indeed like to make jokes based on strange words. So I think someone can purposely say it to sound like "
viadinho ", diminutive form of “viado”, a pejorative slang meaning a “fag” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fag_(pejorative)). :shock:
As I said, this kind of joke with foreign terms is a very common place here. So, we, the users of the toolkit, will have to take care of the pronunciation here, trying to avoid the misspelling. The people can and will laugh but it’s OK, just fun (in my opinion). I think it would be very hard to select an unique word appropriate to all languages in the globe.
By the way, nice logo. Looking forward to the 6.0 release! :mrgreen:
Vaadin doesn’t mean anything in my native language (Sinhala), but it sounds very nice.
I am a new user to the Toolkit (about 1 month), and the only two things that I saw as wrong with it are the name and the comparative lack of documentation.
The name is fixed now- I hope the docs will follow as well.
Maybe if you start a user wiki (or do you already have one that I missed?), we can contribute too.
I personally would love the chance to give something back to the “Vaadin Community”
Wiki is located on http://dev.itmill.com/
There is even quite a few articles written by the community.
We are in process of rebuilding the web-site for Vaadin launch. I hope the new site will be more approachable in terms of finding documentation and contributing to the wiki.
