Time for another episode of Vaadin Community Spotlight. This time I had the opportunity to talk with Ángel Martínez.
Ángel Martínez has a BSc and MSc in Telecommunications Engineering and a Masters degree in Business Development & Digital Marketing. He has more than 10 years experience working in R&D projects related to health care, wellbeing, social inclusion, and independent living. He is the father of Leo and is passionate about climbing, running, and of course, new technologies.
Hi Ángel, it’s great to have you with us for this interview. You have been doing a lot of web development with Vaadin. How did you come upon Vaadin and why did you decide to use it?
First of all, a huge thanks for having me. I’m more than glad to be interviewed by Vaadin. My love story with Vaadin started in 2012, when I had to code the frontend for an R&D project which aim was to release a technological platform that provides daily guidance and support for the informal caregiver community, for the long-term care of their loved ones (elderly people). The (sad) reality was that coding with pure web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript was out of my scope, but I had good expertise developing with Java Programming Language (using both SE and EE flavours). Then, I carried out some research about well-accepted frameworks for Java developers and found The 2014 Decision Maker’s Guide to Java Web Frameworks (thanks a million to the Rebellabs team for writing such a good report). After writing two “Hello world” pieces of code, I was totally in love with Vaadin Framework.
Since then, and until today, I have been using it on a daily basis in both professional and personal projects. I have also been involved in the Community and even had the opportunity to take part in the IBM Vaadin Challenge in 2014, and guess what? I won one of the prizes!
So, how does Vaadin work? Could you briefly explain it for anyone with no previous experience?
The thing I like most about Vaadin is how easy and fast it is to develop a web application from scratch. Do you have some experience coding with pure Java? If so, I bet you a beer that you are able to code and (at least) locally run your own “Hello world” Vaadin application in less than 10 minutes. You will spend more time setting up the working environment, installing the required plugins and so on, than coding it (true story, I am not joking).
What other technologies or libraries are you often using in your Vaadin projects?
Although there are not specific libraries, currently I am very focused in the integration of Vaadin projects with cloud infrastructure, like Google App Engine, Amazon Web Services, and IBM Bluemix. It’s an exciting topic and there are a lot of interesting things to do there!
What are the top features you’d like to see in the upcoming versions of Vaadin Framework?
Although it is a very difficult question, I’d add to my “letter to the three wise men” the following topics: 1) the possibility to develop Vaadin applications on the client side in the same way they are coded on the server side, and 2) a better integration with cloud infrastructures (may I ask for an update in the source code of the GAEServlet class?) and the inclusion of the Viritin plugin to the trunk of Vaadin Framework.
Anything else you'd like to add?
Once and again, thanks a million for giving me the opportunity to answer your questions. Also, many thanks for coding such a good framework and releasing it as Open Source. You are doing an awesome job with this. And of course, please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or doubts. I am more than happy to talk with you on twitter (@angel_cavero) or through my 100% pure Vaadin website (http://deunosyceros.appspot.com).