I’ve been coding since the 80’s on a zillion platforms and Vaadin has given me one of those “OMG this is awesome” shiver-down-the-back moments - I think I’m in love.
My favorite moment so far was writing a button click handler that had a small error in the back-end code (oh I love that you seamlessly marshal the clicks over the network and do everything for me) so it threw an exception. What blew me away was seeing Vaadin send the exception stack trace back to the browser and display it in a popup window, with a little red exclamation mark superimposed on the button that was clicked. !!! ROFL!
Fantastic, fantabulous work, my mind is blown.
I’m starting to rant about this to my friends…
A key selling point for me and many other is the Vaadin sampler (with ‘view Java source’) ; it reminded me a lot of the Adobe Flex stuff and was very useful to see how complete the GUI widgets are, how nice they look, how hard it is to write code for (i.e. not) , and most of all try it out in three browsers at the same time and see it work properly.
Language-wise I went from strongly to weakly typed languages for web stuff for a long time (and I have a great love of PHP for the 2-minute hack), but modern Java IDEs are so good at using the strong type information in Java to help you debug-as-you-write, that Java in general is winning me back for bigger projects. (not to mention the quality and ubiquity of good team tools; javadocs, etc)
This beats the crap out of Flex; ok some of the fancy widgets might not quite be there (limitations with HTML and the DOM) but things have been moving really fast in the browser world for the last few years and it’s clearly the wave of the future. I love that GWT can seamlessly adapt as more capable browsers come out.
The bow on top is that GWT/Vaadin abstracts the vast amount of nuts’n’bolts away and genuinely delivers browser-as-a-GUI.
It’s all very, very nice indeed - it feels to me like “the way to go” for web development,. I’d me more hesitant to put my eggs in this (complex) basket EXCEPT for the obvious solidity of Vaadin already, the use of well understood components (Hibernate, Tomcat, etc), and the fact it’s built on top of GWT, which is only getting better and better.