Our friends at Akquinet have been very active again this month. This time not with new UI components, but with some really cool RAD tools to get started with Vaadin apps. The Vaadinator project consists of a project template (maven archetype) and some code generator tools that automatically create a CRUD UI based on the entity objects you have in your project. So, just define your data model and you have your first fully functional Vaadin application ready. Naturally you don’t need to stay with the auto generated UI, but you can just inherit or copy the generated UI code and make your customizations. The generated code has a nice MVP pattern in place so the generated stuff is really useful for a larger business application as well.
The default templates in Vaadinator create Vaadin TouchKit based UI code, but you can also create your custom templates for the UI code. For the auto generated backend, you can choose between EJBs that use container managed transactions or plain servlet container compatible custom service. The project is fairly new, so expect some rough edges, but please, try it out and give some feedback and contributions. I have a strong feeling that this project might make Vaadin more popular than ever!
We have lately discussed a lot about testability and e.g. load testing your Vaadin apps. One of our consultants, Johannes Tuikkala, packaged a utility he has been using in a few customer projects. It is a custom servlet to use during the development phase to make load testing scripts built with tools like JMeter or Gatling more stable and easier to develop.
If you have had some issues with making your Eclipse-IVY-Vaadin project work in Google App Engine (GAE), check out this page, set up by Michael Cochez. The instructions have been made for a university course, but they’ll naturally work for other purposes as well. GAE is not necessary the most flexible or fastest way to host your apps, but a really cheap way to get started.
The add-on count in our Directory is already closer to 500 and it keeps growing. There have also been many nice updates to various add-ons. I can’t list all of them here, but the new entries are d3Gauge by Kais Hassan, Canvas Plus by Aluis Marte, LazyLayouts by Sami Viitanen and SlideMenu by Thomas Mattsson.
If you missed last week’s Building “Bootiful” UIs with Spring Boot and Vaadin webinar by Josh Long (Pivotal) and Peter Lehto (Vaadin), be sure to follow the Spring Developer channel. The recorded webinar will appear there in the upcoming weeks. If you are interested in Spring Boot, Spring Data, Facebook, MongoDB, Leaflet and Vaadin, the example we crafted for the webinar is already in github. Even with that many technologies, it’s a super simple example of how to wire these exciting technologies together. Just install and run MongoDB, import the project into your favorite IDE, do a full build (mvn package) and run the main method from the Application class.
If you have any tips for the upcoming Community Spotlights, post them below and we’ll be sure to have them on our list of what you in the community are creating with Vaadin.