After working now with Vaading for some days I have decided to put some more effort into learning this framework and applying it to some real projects. So far I’m using Eclipse, Tomcat 6, EclipseLink and Guice as my setup. What i would like to know is what a “best practice approved” setup for Vaadin projects should (or could) look like. Maybe Hibernate instead of Eclipselink ? Maybe a full J2EE stack instead of Tomcat ? Maybe some other server to speed up redeployment while developing (and get rid of the PermGen Space - OutOfMemory message) ?
The “best” setup probably depends a lot on your application and your needs. If you have something really simple and “need” fast server startup (for example, if you are distributing your application and want to provide a one-click run application from the desktop), then jetty could be an option. On the other had, if you have enterprise needs, then probably glassfish or jboss could be what you want (I’m no experts on different application servers, so can’t say really).
Anyway, something I do have a strong opinion is your JPA provider, stick with EclipseLink! I’ve used both EclipseLink and Hibernate with Vaadin and I have to say that EL gives me much, much less headache compared to Hibernate.
I am using the glassfish bundle for eclipse on Win XP Pro (with only 1 GB of ram) and it works great. I also use it on Solaris x64, but I have not tried using Vaadin on that OS yet.