Book Image

Learning Vaadin 7: Second Edition

By : Nicolas Fränkel
Book Image

Learning Vaadin 7: Second Edition

By: Nicolas Fränkel

Overview of this book

<p>Vaadin is a new Java web framework for making applications look great and perform well, making your users happy. Vaadin promises to make your user interfaces attractive and usable while easing your development efforts and boosting your productivity as a developer. Vaadin is a web framework that addresses common issues such as poor choice of controls, heterogeneity of technology stacks, page-flow paradigm, and browser compatibility.</p> <p>This book a practical guide that will help you in creating top-notch web applications with one of the best frameworks based on Java. You will learn about the fundamental concepts that are the cornerstones of the framework. Also, this book will show you how to integrate Vaadin with popular frameworks and how to run it on top of internal as well as externalized infrastructures.</p> <p>Learning Vaadin: Second Edition is a practical, step-by-step tutorial to understanding, using, and mastering the art of RIA development with Vaadin. You will learn about the fundamental concepts that are the cornerstones of the framework, at the same time as making progress on building your own web application. The book will also show you how to integrate Vaadin with other popular frameworks and how to run it on top of internal as well as externalized infrastructures.</p> <p>This book will show you how to become a professional Vaadin developer by giving you a concrete foundation through diagrams, practical examples, and ready-to-use source code. It will enable you to grasp all the notions behind Vaadin one step at a time: components, layouts, events, containers, and bindings. You will learn to build first-class web applications using best-of-breed technologies. You will find detailed information on how to integrate Vaadin's presentation layer on top of other widespread technologies, such as Spring, CDI, and Hibernate. Finally, the book will show you how to deploy on different infrastructures like JBoss Portal and Cloud Foundry.</p> <p>With this book in hand you will be able to utilize the full range of development and deployment features offered by Vaadin while thoroughly understanding the concepts.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)

Vaadin and other IDEs


In both IDEs, the Vaadin plugin helps us jumpstart a project in a matter of minutes. However, it may be interesting to understand what is really done in the created project by the plugin in case we need to do it manually in other IDEs which don't have such plugins.

Adding Vaadin libraries

First we should add Vaadin libraries and their dependencies to the web application's WEB-INF/lib folder. According to Java EE specifications, this means that our code can now access the Vaadin JAR as it is on the web application's classpath.

Note

Previous versions of Vaadin only needed a single approximately 70 MB Vaadin JAR that contained all classes, all mandatory dependencies and compiled HTML. Starting with version 7, Vaadin has become more modular and started to rely on external dependencies: on one hand, it is now more complex to package what is needed, but on the other hand, we have the choice of what we package.

For the time being, there is no need to explicitly describe each library...