The recent hype about the Play ! Framework seemed to have lead to a lot of people thinking “That’s it! That’s how it ought to be”. And after trying to reproduce the Play ! tutuorial, I immediately agreed. Web development should be as easy as in Play !
But Play ! is just simplifying the daily work with a request-response, HTML-based website. There are other frameworks out there, that aim to simplify the work with stateful, component-based thinking, which is often the case with web applications. So I stumbled upon this gem here, doing precisely that:
Vaadin builds upon the GWT (Google Web Toolkit), which is a solid base for web frameworks. It has a free, open-source version, as well as a “pro version”, which gives you access to better support. In both cases, users can take advantage of a nice set of add-ons, and the community seems to be non-negligible:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vaadin
Maybe another candidate for a jOOQ-web integration?
Thanks for the compliment :)
Just to set one thing clear, there is no such thing as a non-free pro version of Vaadin, and never will be. The whole library is totally open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
As for the commercial side of Vaadin Ltd we do have a support service offering (the Vaadin Pro Account), and also a few added value add-ons. These commercial add-ons are in no way essential for any project or UI.
Currently there are 201 add-ons available in the Vaadin Directory (http://www.vaadin.com/directory), and 5 of those are commercial ones offered by us.
Anyway, we look forward to anything interesting you might come up using Vaadin. If you run into any problems just head over to our forums, which is frequented by dozens of helpful experts.
I myself don’t like component-based web frameworks, but I understand that if you have a website loaded with forms, they should be the way to go. Not considering the horrible feedback on performance that I have heard from JSF.
I really liked the PRO strategy. Fair without being socialist. It never hurts to make some money from your hard work. :)
If you ask me, you shouldn’t be thinking in terms of “liking” or “not liking” framework architectures. The question of whether or not a framework is suited for a task at hand is much more interesting. The request-response model is a very low level approach for rich applications whereas the component-driven model is overkill for websites.
This also applies for a jOOQ vs JPA discussion. Do you need high performing, tightly coupled database interaction? Use jOOQ. Do you need distributed, cached domain model persistence? Use JPA.
In that sense, Vaadin is a nice tool to know about. I’m certainly going to use it along with jOOQ for an intranet database management and analysis tool.
Hi Lukas,
i’m currently working on a integration of Vaadin and Jooq. I think both libs fit quite well for something like ‘data visualization’. My aim is to replace database exploration via sql commands with a flexible view and filter mechanism build upon vaadin and jooq.
Hi Manfred,
That’s very nice to hear. I’d be curious about the outcome of this project, if you’d like to share more!
Cheers
Lukas