tutorial

For Vaadin beginners

The Tutorial

We suggest new Vaadin developers to start with the tutorial. You'll get your first Vaadin app running in minutes and you can continue until you have a simple UI built for a customer database. The tutorial uses Eclipse IDE, but if you have already mastered another IDE, you can follow the tutorial with it as well.

Start the Tutorial

Quickstarts

There are multiple ways to start a project with Vaadin Framework. Here are couple of most common approaches. You can also download a specific version.

Select Environment

Maven

Maven is a uniform build environment for Java that simplifies the build process by providing an automatic dependency resolution, a uniform project structure, source references and unit test reports.

Install Maven

 

Using Vaadin with Maven

Maven is the de-facto build tool for Java web applications. Major IDEs also support Maven out of the box and most often you'll be using Maven via your favorite IDE. For the impatient, here's how to get your first Vaadin application up and running using the command line:

mvn -B archetype:generate \
		-DarchetypeGroupId=com.vaadin \
		-DarchetypeArtifactId=vaadin-archetype-application \
		-DarchetypeVersion=8.12.2 \
		-DgroupId=org.test \
		-DartifactId=vaadin-app \
		-Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT
		cd vaadin-app
		mvn package jetty:run

A hello world style Vaadin application is now running at http://localhost:8080/.

There are couple of other archetypes available, which might suit better for certain use cases. Vaadin docs site lists available archetypes and all available modules.

Video tutorials

Eclipse

Eclipse is the most popular integrated development environment (IDE) among Java developers. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. Eclipse is a free open source software and governed by the Eclipse foundation.

Download Eclipse
 

Using Vaadin with Eclipse

In Eclipse, you can use Vaadin with the built-in Maven support or make your life even easier with the Vaadin Eclipse plugin. You can install Vaadin Designer to your Eclipse to edit your UIs visually. The Vaadin tutorial also uses Eclipse IDE. The documentation site contains more details about the Vaadin Plug-in for Eclipse.

Install Vaadin Plugin
 

Video tutorials

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is a Java integrated development environment (IDE) for developing computer software. It is developed by JetBrains, and is available as an Apache 2 Licensed community edition, and as a proprietary commercial edition. Both can be used for commercial development.

Download IntelliJ IDEA
 

Using Vaadin with IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA is the tool of choice for many Java professionals and has good support for Vaadin. The suggested method is to use Maven and archetypes via the Maven support provided by IntelliJ. The Vaadin Designer is also available for IntelliJ IDEA. The ultimate edition of IntelliJ IDEA also has support for using Vaadin without a build script.

IntelliJ IDEA Vaadin instructions
 

Install NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is an open-source integrated development environment. NetBeans IDE supports development of all Java application types (Java SE (including JavaFX), Java ME, web, EJB and mobile applications) out of the box.

Vaadin developers most likely want to start with the Java EE distribution.

Download NetBeans IDE
 

Using Vaadin with NetBeans

You can easily use Vaadin with plain NetBeans by using its Maven support, but there is a Vaadin plugin available for NetBeans as well. It provides, for example, Vaadin specific code hints, project wizards and integrated Vaadin Directory support for easier add-on usage.

Get Vaadin Plug-in for NetBeans
 

Gradle

Gradle is an open source build automation system that builds upon the concepts of Apache Ant and Apache Maven and introduces a Groovy-based domain-specific language (DSL) instead of the XML form used by Apache Maven for declaring the project configuration. Gradle uses a directed acyclic graph ("DAG") to determine the order in which tasks can be run.

Gradle website

 

Using Vaadin with Gradle

The Vaadin Gradle plugin allows you to easily build Vaadin projects with Gradle. It helps with building the widgetset and running the GWT development mode. It also helps you to quickly get started by providing tasks for project, component and theme creation.

Vaadin Gradle Plugin

Apache Ivy

Apache Ivy is a dependencies manager with transitive dependencies support and much more features. With Apache Ivy, you define the dependencies of your module in an xml file, called an ivy-file. Then you usually ask Apache Ivy to retrieve your dependencies to a local lib dir, and it does it for you by locating the artifacts of your dependencies in the repositories, such as the maven2 repository for instance.

Apache Ivy website
 

Using Vaadin with IVY

Apache Ivy can access Vaadin modules directly from the Maven central, so you can easily access them from your project using Ivy. You can integrate Ivy into your ANT build producing your WAR file. Ivy was also the old default for the Vaadin Eclipse plugin. The package names and versions are the same as with Maven.

Apache Ivy website