Would you think Vaadin adapted to achieve the following thing : Let’s says you have your web site “A” which you created with Vaadin and that’s fine. Now, you also want to offer applications with a software as a service approach from this website. So let’s say you propose 3 services named here “A1”, “A2” and “A3”. To have an idea of these services and to keep things simple, let’s say A1 = a forum, A2 = a Pet Shop, A3 = a wysiwyg wiki using ckeditor. We also suppose that some of these applications make use of a JS library like (ExtJS, Jquery just mentionend here as examples) to offer rich gui components.
On the other side, you have potential clients who may be interested into some of these applications or all of them. Let’s take one of these clients we name here “B”. B has his own web site which delivers simple content but unhappily, he does not have any added value in terms of application he wants to offer to his team members or community members. B web site is built with php and we will consider the B server can run only php code.
As “A” would like to have “B” among its customers, “A” develops a php specific piece of code (let’s name it “local code”) which role is to encapsulte the applications A1, A2 and A3 into some pages of the B web site. So, when a team member of B will navigate on the web site B and click on the forum link for example, “local code” installed on the B server will contact the web site “A” for asking the application service A1 which delivers back the page visual structure and related content. Of course, when the user navigate through the forum, each of his interactions will be taken into account by “local code” which comes again into action with server A and the A1 application. So, “local code” allow to offer B members the A1 application on the B server as a portion of the page.
“Local code” may have local resources like images and js librairies, this allowing B to custom some things in terms of appearance (and save bandwith and performance as images won’t be delivered by server A). If B want to custom some layout, he would have to modify some templates (stored on the A server) dedicated to the B web site.
Can Vaadin be appropriate to such a situation without diving into weird things (this happens when we try to achieve a goal with a product not adapted to) ?
Hoping to have been clear with these explanations i tried to make brief…