I’m really liking what I see of Vaadin. I have a few questions to determine whether it will fit my needs.
I understand that Vaadin intends to abstract away HTML as much as possible, but is it possible to get at the HTML generated by a given component? I like that WAI ARIA is slated for Vaadin 7, but I’d like to add ARIA roles on my layout components. Much of this involves just setting an attribute on the container, but my sense is that this may not be possible due to the many abstractions at play.
I also understand that Vaadin is designed for apps and highly rich sites, which is most of what I’m building. However, some of my apps have a static component. For instance, someone may update their store, and I’d like to output a search engine friendly page with a bit of SEO magic to draw in visitors and engage them with the app. Is it at all possible to generate more static pages with Vaadin, something to give the app a larger surface area for discoverability?
Unfortunately WAI-ARIA was dropped from Vaadin 7 during the development cycle and postponed to later release.
Vaadin is more suitable for applications than sites. You might want to consider combining Vaadin with some other technology to produce a site with highly interactive portions. For example, vaadin.com uses Liferay portal for serving static contents. That said - if you do use Vaadin for building the whole site, you can detect the search engines and serve them with static pages suitable for indexing. These pages are not automatically generated though.
Would be quite hard to do in the application code.
That said - adding roles to many of the components is trivial in the framework. Patches are welcome and would be accepted fast if they are small, clear and isolated.