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 – expanding components


Follow these steps to get rid of that gap:

  1. VerticalLayout (and other layouts too) has a method to specify how contained components should expand. Try adding this line to the MainLayout constructor:

    setExpandRatio(lowerSection, 1);
  2. Run the application.

What just happened?

Take a look at the resulting layout:

Think of expand ratios as the amount of space that some component can take inside its parent layout expressed as a ratio. Initially, upperSection and lowerSection had both an undefined expand ratio, which means that, to be fair, each could take at most 50 percent of the space in the parent layout. We haven't assigned any height for upperSection. Its height is undefined, so upperSection shrinks to use only the space it needs to hold the inner label showing the text Header. However, we assigned a height of 100 percent (by calling setSizeFull) to lowerSection, which means that it will occupy all the lower 50 percent of the space. Only the lower 50 percent...