We skipped the July’s episode due to summer vacations, so there are a lot of community efforts in the buffer. Here is just a part of the cool stuff that has happened in the Vaadin community during the past months. We’ll get to add-on updates and other articles in the next episode.
Wajdi Almir Ahmad has written a nice tutorial to jaxenter.de that covers using JS libraries with GWT JSNI binding and Vaadin. Although in Vaadin 7 there is also a plain JS+server side Java method to do this, which may be slightly faster to get started, this is still the way to go with non-trivial components.
SmartMeter Light is a commercial JMeter substitute. It supports load testing Vaadin applications, even without disabling XSRF protection, the infamous feature teasing load testers. Related to it, they wrote an in depth explanation of how the XSRF mechanism works in Vaadin, something you might be interested in even if you don’t need a load testing tool.
Since Liferay 7, Vaadin won’t be bundled as a part of the Liferay distribution due to architectural changes in Liferay. The bundled approach was somewhat problematic already in the past when portlets wanted to use different versions of Vaadin, so already recently we started to advocate for “self-contained packaging” of Vaadin portlets. The downside with that is a slightly increased resource usage. As Liferay 7 will be based on OSGi: you can kind of get the best of both worlds. Core Vaadin is an OSGi bundle, Vaadin add-ons can be OSGi bundles and you can build, for example, your own “vaadin-tools” bundle to be shared by all or some of your Vaadin based portlets. Sampsa Sohlman wrote a great article about his experiments with OSGi based Vaadin portlets in Liferay 7.
How many times have you written a top level “navigation framework”, with a menu or “sidebar” for switching between main views? No need to do that again, especially if you are using Vaadin Spring. Petter Holmström wrote a nice add-on for Vaadin CDI users that automatically collects the views you have annotated to a sidebar that provides a “top level navigation”. A similar helper for CDI applications can be found from my cdi-helpers add-on. If you have any improvement ideas for either of those, let us know about them via GitHub.
Those writing GWT or client side Vaadin apps should definitely check out the new GWT with Polymer Elements tutorial by Manuel Carrasco Moñino. It uses the gwt-polymer-elements library born in our labs and it is probably the easiest way to build stuff to comply with Google’s Material Design principles in GWT applications.