Book Image

Vaadin 7 UI Design By Example: Beginner's Guide

Book Image

Vaadin 7 UI Design By Example: Beginner's Guide

Overview of this book

Vaadin is a mature, open-source, and powerful Java framework used to build modern web applications in plain Java. Vaadin brings back the fun of programming UI interfaces to the web universe. No HTML, no CSS, no JavaScript, no XML. Vaadin lets you implement web user interfaces using an object oriented model, similar to desktop technologies such as Swing and AWT. Vaadin 7 UI Design By Example: Beginner's Guide is an engaging guide that will teach you how to develop web applications in minutes. With this book, you will Develop useful applications and learn basics of Java web development. By the end of the book you will be able to build Java web applications that look fantastic. The book begins with simple examples using the most common Vaadin UI components and quickly move towards more complex applications as components are introduced chapter-by-chapter. Vaadin 7 UI Design By Example: Beginner's Guide shows you how to use Eclipse, Netbeans, and Maven to create Vaadin projects. It then demonstrates how to use labels, text fields, buttons, and other input components. Once you get a grasp of the basic usage of Vaadin, the book explains Vaadin theory to prepare you for the rest of the trip that will enhance your knowledge of Vaadin UI components and customization techniques.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Vaadin 7 UI Design By Example Beginner's Guide
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Time for action – installing the plugin


Steps to install the Vaadin plugin for Eclipse are as follows:

  1. In Eclipse, go to Help | Eclipse Marketplace….

  2. Type Vaadin in the Find field inside the Search tab and press Enter.

  3. Click on the Install button besides the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse heading.

  4. Eclipse will calculate some requirements and dependencies. Once it does, make sure the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse is checked and click on Next.

  5. Read and accept the terms of the license agreement and click on Finish to start installing the plugin.

    Tip

    I always keep processes like this running in the background. This helps me to be more productive because I can read or write some code, change configuration, deploy to a server, or perform any other IDE related action while having the background process moving forward.

  6. The installation process can take some minutes. You will be prompted to accept installing software that contains unsigned content. Click on OK when asked to and let Eclipse continue with the installation.

  7. Finally, Eclipse will ask you if you want to restart the IDE. Do it. Once you restart Eclipse, you'll see a little reindeer logo on the toolbar, that's the Vaadin logo and means that the plugin is ready.

What just happened?

We've just prepared Eclipse to start hacking! Using the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse we'll be able to create new Vaadin projects, custom components, and themes. But before that, we will have to install a web server to deploy our Vaadin applications.

Note

You might have noted that the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse installed an additional plugin: IvyDE. Ivy is a tool for managing dependencies, usually all the JAR files that your project needs. Don't worry too much if you don't know Ivy, just go through the following steps and we will get some fun in a couple of minutes, I promise.

Installing Run Jetty Run plugin

Although we can deploy to most Java servers, we will use Jetty throughout this book. Jetty is a fast open source web server that implements the Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages technologies. These technologies make it possible to develop web applications using Java.