We are evaluating Vaadin for new application and have follwoing concerns. May be some of them is lack of understanding. Appreciate your comments
it is very verbose . to do something simple…you write plenty of code.
It does magically produce html. Magic is bad…can’t be understood by engineers. very difficult to troubleshoot.
very difficult to do ui-testing . we must use their test bench. and this makes us married to vaadin.
no html5 feature can be used unless they release a new version in someway.
community support is limited.
philosophy of vaadin is wrong(same language for front+bank) : a person who knows java can’t necessarily write UI. you need specialized people to write front end/bank end.
they run on server: everyone has powerful computer and devices. then why run everything on server?
a huge application will likely run into memory issues.
It is not more verbose than most other frameworks I have used over the years. As a matter of fact I find with some of the MVP addons available here in the Directory , I find that the programs become quite compact ( ie less template coding )
Software engineers understand Java , to not have to do anything with Html is Magic and we love Vaadin exactly for that reason… ( Perhaps you need to get real engineers and not mechanics claiming to be engineers ??)
Very difficult to do UI testing with most any application framework, at least Vaadin provide you with a good Tool to do just that ( What more can you ask for ? )
No need for new Version. Go do some proper reasearch, you can easily write your own HTML5 components , the Addon directory even have some, Canvas comes to mind…
I doubt that very much. Do you have any hard stats ? What is the percentage of questions on this forum that did not get answered ? If it gets anywhere upwards of 5% I’d be very surprised.
But it gets better , you can get commercial support too , get a Pro account…
Not quite sure you understand the technology here… The front end is based in GWT. GWT was made to parse Java and generate the html/javascript because of the benefit of having a single Language for an application instead of having multiple Languages… Have you ever worked on a big project ? Big as in 500k lines or more ??? If you had you would know this is the real magic of Vaadin. As a matter of fact , I have found that it is very easy for me to work with a graphic designer on Vaadin projects. I make the application , the graphic designer makes the themes…
Perhaps you confuse applications and websites ?? Single tier applications have basically been abandoned for more than a decade ( at least at all the enterprises I have worked at over the last 20 years ). Vaadin is designed to write rich web
applications , while nothing stops you from making simple websites with Vaadin that would be like using a 20 wheeler truck to move your bed…
…Speculation… , any huge application will likely run into memory issues… , Only memory issues I had so far with Vaadin has nothing to do with Vaadin ( Permgen space on development environment from multiple deployments, this is a JVM thing and should not occur in production environments )
On the other hand with a well written Vaadin application you can scale using Clustering.
very few
Applications are…
Do you have any real data to compare Vaadin application with other Framework ??
Just some thoughts from a ‘limited support’ community member…
The perceived verbosity level depends a lot on what you are comparing with. Comparing with writing separate HTML and backend code in different languages. I personally feel like the amount of code required to write a Vaadin application is most often less than with many other frameworks.
There is really no magic going on under the hood. It is all just plain Java code and GWT compiled code on the client side. The Book of Vaadin explains the architecture pretty well, and should remove much of the magic. If you feel that you need to control every DOM element that gets rendered, Vaadin is definitely not the right choice. However, if you value developer productivity, you’ll definitely gain some advantages when working on a higher level of abstraction like Vaadin.
Quite the contrary. Since all UI code is Java, you have all the testing tools available to you that you have when testing your business code. Writing unit tests for your UI code is very straight forward as long as you keep your code well structured (another benefit of testing).
What features of HTML5 are you specifically wishing to use? Vaadin 7 is fully HMTL5 compliant, so you should not have any problems there.
Vaadin has a very active and engaged community that will usually get you unstuck very quickly. In addition to this, Vaadin offers commercial support that will give you a guaranteed response time to your questions.
In addition to the community, we have good documentation like the Book of Vaadin and the Vaadin 7 Wiki.
Why is this a bad thing? Just because the UI code is in Java doesn’t mean that you need to have backend developers working on it. Having both in Java will offer many benefits like simple method calls within the same JVM, type safe calls etc. You will of course need to do CSS work separately from the UI logic, but this should be doable by anyone proficient with CSS.
If you are looking to build standalone applications, Vaadin is definitely not the right framework for you. Vaadin is designed for building Rich Internet Applications - running on a server is at the core of the framework. Having your application running on a server offers several advantages over standalone applications, like not having to maintain support for a diverse base of old versions that are still in use.
This will be true for any large software project. Using one framework or another will not change that.
This is one of the great strengths of Vaadin. Your UI code can be much more succinct and richer since you do not need to start all over for each request.
In which way? Have you read through the Vaadin scalability study?