The conference on the future of full-stack Java
Vaadin
Create /26
27-28 October 2026 · Barcelona, Spain
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Code smarter. Build faster. Ship better apps.
AI can help you write more code. Legacy systems still need to reach the web. And full-stack teams are under more pressure than ever to ship secure, accessible apps — fast.
The harder questions are what to build, how to keep control, and how to make your applications last.
For two days in Barcelona, developers building real Java web applications across the ecosystem — Jakarta EE, Spring Boot, Kotlin and Vaadin — explored those questions together. They looked at new approaches to AI-assisted development, enterprise UI, and modernization, and examined the engineering decisions behind them.
Missed it, or want to revisit a talk? The session recordings are available on this page.
Hosted by Vaadin. Open to every Java developer.
Who should watch?
Java developers, full-stack engineers, architects, and technical leads building business applications. Whether you already use Vaadin or are exploring a Java-based approach to web development, the recordings are a chance to challenge your assumptions, compare approaches, and find ideas worth bringing back to your team.
Four themes shaping Java web development
Explore talks, production case studies, live demos, and expert office hours.
Follow your main interest or connect the dots across all four themes.
Follow your main interest or connect the dots across all four themes.
AI-assisted development
Explore spec-driven workflows, coding agents, and AI-powered application features. Learn where to add guardrails—and where developer judgment matters more than ever.
Modernization & migration
Plan the next chapter for your Java applications. Explore legacy-to-web approaches and Accenture’s journey from Vaadin 8 to 25, with lessons from systems that need to keep running.
Architecture, performance & security
Make better decisions about server resources, application security, and deployment. Examine the trade-offs behind scalable, maintainable Java applications—not just the architecture diagram.
Full-stack & UI
Connect design and development through Figma, AI-ready design systems, and metadata-driven interfaces. Explore internationalization and practical theming techniques for the applications your users work in every day.
Featured Speakers
Josh Long
Spring Developer Advocate, Broadcom
Marcus Hellberg
VP of Products, Vaadin
Simon Martinelli
Programming Architect, Martinelli LLC
César Quinteiro Rendo
CTO, Intergal S.Coop.G.
Laura Fiona Holder-Wurzinger
Expert, UX, Product & Design, AKDB
Session recordings
Talks recorded at Vaadin Create 2026 in Barcelona. Sign in with your free Vaadin account to watch.
Welcome to Vaadin Create 2026
Explore the future of business app development with Vaadin and Spring. From AI-powered productivity and the latest in Vaadin 25 - Flow, Design System, Modernization, and Copilot—to new advances in Spring Boot and Spring AI. Get inspired by how innovation is reshaping enterprise Java development.
Marcus Hellberg
CPTO, Vaadin
Fredrik Rönnlund
COO/CMO, Vaadin
AI powered UIs
Learn about new features that make it easy to integrate LLMs into your Flow application and provide your users with features like AI-generated charts and grid, and AI-powered form fillers and filtering UIs.
Rolf Smeds
Product Manager, Vaadin
Figma to Vaadin UI
Learn how to generate Vaadin UI code from a Figma design in two ways. Vaadin Copilot offers a deterministic workflow, while an AI agent combined with Figma MCP provides full flexibility. Discover how Figma is shaping its product to streamline the designer-developer handoff. We’ll also take a peek at Claude Design and other emerging design tools and explore how they can utilize the Vaadin Design System.
Juuso Kantonen
UX Team Lead, Vaadin
From design system to developer experience: Making enterprise UI AI-ready with MCP
Design systems contain a wealth of knowledge about components, accessibility, interaction patterns, design tokens, and implementation, but it is often scattered across documentation, design files, and source code. In this session, we share how AKDB is evolving its Vaadin-based enterprise design system into an AI-ready Developer and Designer Experience framework, with an MCP-based integration at its center.
Laura Fiona Holder-Wurzinger
Expert, UX, Product & Design, AKDB
“I wonder if it can do that?” Accelerating software development through curiosity
Lighthouse, an ERP and customer portal for energy consultancy, started as a small proof of concept and became a rapidly evolving platform now in daily production use. The difference wasn't a bigger budget, it was a change in reflex: every chore became a question, can AI do this instead? That question led to an entire AI-assisted development supply chain, from planning work before code gets written to escaping endless AI debugging loops and keeping UX design from drifting apart.
Marc Müller-Stoffels
Managing Partner, En-Concept® Energy Consultancy GmbH
Turning Vaadin into a dynamic enterprise platform through metadata
Most Vaadin applications are built around manually coded CRUD views. But what happens when the representation of your frontend no longer lives in source code? This session shows how a team transformed Vaadin into a fully dynamic, metadata-driven enterprise platform powering a real production ERP system, where UI structure, navigation, validation rules, workflows, and even business processes are structured metadata. Your UI stops being code and becomes data.
César Quinteiro Rendo
CTO, Intergal S.Coop.G.
Improving agentic Vaadin DX: Lessons learned
During the past months, we have worked on improving the developer experience when using AI agents to build Vaadin applications. In this session, I'll go through what we have done, where we are going and what lessons we have learned on the way.
Petter Holmström
Principal Software Engineer, Vaadin
Bootiful Spring Security
It's not real until it's secure, and there's no better framework with which to secure your applications than Spring Security. Join me and we'll look at how Spring Security works, how to integrate it into your applications, and where you can scale out to secure your systems and services.
Josh Long
Spring Developer Advocate, Broadcom
The future of full-stack development
Vaadin's flavor of full-stack development gives plenty: UI in server-side Java, close to the backend, with component state automatically synchronized to the browser. But architecturally, deployment remains a trade-off. You want scale-down to zero, Kubernetes with suddenly disappearing pods, and scalability without session affinity, and the very convenient component state gets in the way. A potential unicorn is in sight. But does it have what it takes?
Leif Åstrand
VP of Research, Vaadin
Spec-driven development: Why Vaadin is the perfect fit
AI makes coding faster, but speed does not solve the real problem: specifications and implementation drifting apart. This session shows a practical spec-driven approach based on the AI Unified Process, where structured requirements and system use cases drive the application, and why Vaadin's server-side model, type safety, and unified Java stack give AI agents a consistent and predictable environment to generate UI and backend together.
Simon Martinelli
Programming Architect, Martinelli LLC
Introducing Draiv: Your GUI as an A(gent)I(nterface)
Draiv is a working name for an experiment that lets AI agents use Vaadin apps through a lightweight scripting language and a text-based view of the UI component tree. Give agents the same capabilities you’ve already built for your human users, without exposing your service layer, and with less token and CPU overhead than browser automation tools like Playwright. Join us for practical demos and learn how to try this experimental technology in your own app.
Marc Englund
Product Strategist, Vaadin
Browserless testing
Vaadin TestBench’s UI unit testing tooling has a new name, browserless testing, and a permissive Apache 2.0 license. Beyond testing individual UI components, you can write integration and acceptance tests that follow real user stories, all without a browser. This session introduces recent improvements to the browserless-test module and practical ways to use it in agent-assisted Vaadin development.
Matti Tahvonen
Senior Vaadin Expert, Vaadin
Vaadin on Jakarta EE
Do you think Jakarta EE is just for old-school enterprise backend development? Think again. Paired with Vaadin, the Jakarta EE stack becomes a powerhouse for building sophisticated, type-safe web applications entirely in Java. This session skips the theory and builds a full-stack application from scratch with Jakarta EE and a component-based Vaadin frontend, without touching a single line of JavaScript or CSS.
Tatu Lund
Director of Services, Vaadin
Two RAG systems, one laptop, no cloud
Two local RAG demos in plain Java, with no LLM framework in between. The first builds a text RAG pipeline one layer at a time: cosine similarity, competing chunking strategies, vector search against Lucene BM25, hybrid fusion and an LLM-as-judge reranker, then streamed answers with source attribution and a grounding check. The second points the same architecture at a photo library, using a local vision model and OCR to describe, categorize, and search images.
Sven Ruppert
Java Champion & Security Expert
A sovereign adventure: Building a MicroProfile server from scratch using AI
What does it take to build a zero-dependency, TCK-compliant MicroProfile server from scratch in the age of AI? Meet Vidocq, an open-source project built for software sovereignty without massive, opaque dependency chains. See how AI was used as a core engineering partner rather than an autocomplete tool, the workflows used to tackle the Test Compatibility Kit requirements, and a live demo of Vaadin applications running on the server.
Andy Bailey
Freelance Java Backend Developer
Creating and adding Vaadin add-ons
How to create Vaadin add-ons and add them to your applications.
Sami Ekblad
Vaadin
The end of artisan development? Building software in the age of AI agents
I spent two decades learning to see code as craft, then tried to codify that craft into The Vaadin Way. Then AI agents showed up. Today I have colleagues running unchecked AI-generated code in production, and a personal project where an agent writes every line, and I’ve never been more excited about building software. This is not a talk about how to use AI agents with Vaadin. It’s about what happens to craft, experience, and judgment when the machine gets good enough.
Petter Holmström
Principal Software Engineer, Vaadin
Transforming the public sector: Vaadin 8 to 25
Modernizing public sector applications is rarely just about code; it's a marathon of managing technical debt and long-term vision. This session follows a nearly decade-long journey of rescuing mission-critical systems from legacy JSP and fragmented JavaScript, evolving them with Vaadin from version 8 all the way to 25. See practical migration patterns for decoupling from legacy JavaScript, meeting WCAG accessibility standards by default, and keeping applications that serve thousands of citizens resilient.
Juanma Cintas
Tech Architecture Assoc Manager, Accenture
Rafael Molina Jimena
Tech Architecture Assoc Manager, Accenture
AI agents
What started as a hackathon experiment with AI is now how a large part of the code in Vaadin Flow gets written. In this session, learn what the team did, how it changed the way they work, and what they might have done differently, with a live demo along the way.
Artur Signell
CTO, Vaadin
Own your security decisions: A Vaadin application, hardened front to back
Most examples of security in Vaadin applications stop precisely where it starts to matter: at the successful login. This session covers what comes next: throttling the login path, revoking a role so it actually reaches a live session, and session management with a usable audit trail, all built with the JDK and Vaadin alone. It then hardens the server the app runs on, with a minimal system, a front proxy with cleanly terminated TLS, and an attack surface small enough to grasp in full.
Sven Ruppert
Java Champion & Security Expert
Vaadin Copilot in the age of agents
AI agents are reshaping how software gets built, but where does a visual, UI-focused tool like Vaadin Copilot fit when agents write more and more of the code? This session starts with a quick tour of Copilot's core features and what has shipped since last year's Create, then looks ahead: how Copilot complements agent-driven workflows, which gaps agents still leave open in UI development, and the ideas being explored to close them.
Marc Englund
Product Strategist, Vaadin
A type safe i18n solution with Vaadin Flow
Vaadin's built-in option for multilingual UIs is the traditional string-based approach: you define keys for every UI element and keep a ResourceBundle per language. It isn't compile-safe, so a missing key only shows up as a missing translation at runtime. GWT solved this with annotations and interfaces. This session presents a compile-safe i18n solution for Vaadin Flow, built on that GWT idea in a production Vaadin application at emesit.
Rüdiger Schobbert
Senior Java Developer, emesit GmbH & Co. KG
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2 days of ideas, code, and developer conversations
Build what’s next. Bring your team.
Step away from the backlog and make room for a fresh perspective. Bring your questions, compare approaches with other Java teams, and return ready to make better decisions about your next application—or your current one.
Frequently asked questions
We're here to assist you! Feel free to reach out to us with any questions or inquiries at events@vaadin.com
What was Vaadin Create 2026?
Vaadin Create 2026 brought together Java developers and technical teams to explore how better web applications get built. It took place on 27–28 October 2026 at the Hotel Catalonia Barcelona Plaza in Barcelona, Spain, with talks, live demos, and conversations with the Vaadin team.
Are the session recordings available?
Yes. Recordings of 22 talks from Vaadin Create 2026 are available in the Session recordings section on this page.
How do I watch the recordings?
Sign in with your Vaadin account, then click Watch video on any session card. The video opens in a player right on this page. If you aren't signed in, each card shows a Sign in to watch videos link instead.
Do the recordings cost anything?
No. The recordings are free. You only need a free Vaadin account. If you don't have one yet, sign up here. It only takes a few seconds.
Can my team watch the recordings too?
Yes. Anyone can watch them by signing in with their own free Vaadin account, so feel free to share this page with your team.
Do I need to know Vaadin to get value from the talks?
No. Many sessions cover topics relevant to any Java team, such as AI-assisted development, modernization, security, and full-stack architecture. You'll find plenty to take away regardless of your stack.
Who can I contact with questions?
For questions about the event or the recordings, or if you need an invoice for your ticket, contact us at events@vaadin.com.
Bring something you’ve built
Have something cool to share? A useful app. An unexpected experiment. A problem you solved differently. Share it at Community Corner on day 1 after the talks, and start a conversation with developers who understand the work behind it.