I have been exploring/learning and doing some POCs on different UI frameworks out there. I was very much impressed with one of the 10 mins demo on Vaadin. So I decided to take a deeper dive, and I have to say I was very fraustrated and surprised with the quality of demos and recorded sessions you’ve put out there. If I have to grade it, its an F.
I understand a lot of these demos are recordings from presentations made elsewhere, I am sure you could have just recorded the screen. If I have to just stare at the presentor for 2 hours, and barely be able to read the screen, it has zero value. Just show me the damn screen…
What about recording
SHORT online tutorials just for web? I would suggest providing short ‘how to demos’ in three categories : beginners, intermidiate, advanced.
As a beginner in Vaadin, I struggled to find simple tutorials like:
How to connect to database.
How to easily plug in the databse objects into different UI components.
How to easily consume a REST or SOAP webservices.
How to make use of different UI components in Vaadin.
is there a way to do MVC in Vaadin? If so how?
How to do security in Vaadin? Login/Single sign on etc.
I did go through the Book of Vaadin, and it doesn’t have much meat on it. Again, I am a beginner and trying to get my way around Vaadin. I didn’t come across these kind of issues while dabbling with other UI frameworks like JSF. Lots and lots of resources out there. I think Vaadin team needs to spend lot more time creating basic how tos tutorials for beginners.
Thank you for trying out our framework! I’m sorry you found the quality of demos lacking. Please let me try to tackle your issues one by one:
1-2) Core Vaadin only includes one way to connect to a database; the SQLContainer. There are many addons that do this as well, such as JPAContainer. The Book of Vaadin has a chapter for both of them. Of course, the book can’t cover all use cases, but it should cover most of the basics. Also see below.
In my opinion this has nothing to do with Vaadin; the UI layer should not have any idea where the data comes from. With Vaadin you are free to fetch the data however you want, using any Java standard or library. Once you have the data, you can hand it over to the UI.
This is a very broad subject. Our sampler covers all components individually, but you are right in that real projects need more than that. Hovewer, each project is different. Our demos give you a small subset of what we have seen from our customers; the real cases are infinitely more complex and different to eachother. The beauty with Vaadin is that you can use any components in any combination; the only thing limiting you is the number of components on screen at a time (which isn’t a hard limit either, but thousands of components tend to get a bit slow…).
We don’t want to tie our customers into a specific pattern, so no. You are completely free to build the (quite simple) base structure yourself, or better yet, use one of the many pre-made ones in the directory. We have touched on different patterns in many of our demos (e.g. the new TouchKit webinar), and we do cover this in our classroom trainings.
Same thing as above; there are so many different solutions out there that we can’t really restrict this from the side of the framework. You are free to implement your own (or again, use an existing solution from the directory). Some of this has also been covered in webinars and other material.
All in all, thank you for your pointers. I do agree that our material isn’t complete in many cases; we are working hard with both improving the framework and improving our demos. I brought this thread to the attention of our powers-at-be in marketing, hopefully you’ll see some more demos soon
Thanks for the pointers! And I agree with Thomas’s points, but I guess many of those should be mentioned in some of the tutorials (like how you can do database access, MVC, security, logins etc.).
