14 years ago we saw a gap between web and Java - two rising platforms of the day. Since then we have been on a mission of bridging this gap. Some frameworks have considered these as two distant islands, where two separate tribes live speaking different languages. We continue to believe that business applications can be best built with tools that unify these platforms. Today these platforms are stronger than ever - they are the giants that together power most businesses. Today we call them HTML5 and JVM.
UX is your business
Companies like Google, Apple and Facebook have shown that user experience is the key in winning over the competition. In every business it is crucial to jump into the shoes of your product's user, understand what parts of your product he really experiences and how to make that superior to what your competitors will roll out tomorrow. This is the best way for your to lead the pack in today's world where the winner takes it all.
A powerful strategy is to focus on the part that the user really interfaces - the user interface - and steal the best practices for it from the best consumer facing user experiences your users have seen and love today. You just have to imagine how these practices can be adapted to your product.
Empowering developers who build tomorrow
Time and budget always limit the implementation of your vision. For this it is important to recognize the separate set of challenges you have from the ones you use as a benchmark. Maybe they need to scale a larger audience than you? Maybe their users spend less time in their apps? You should skip solving problems you do not have.
While HTML5 is very powerful in itself, building applications straight on it without a high level abstraction can be expensive. What if your vision includes pushing updates to client? Or supporting all major browsers? Or maintaining the codebase with heterogenous distributed team for a long lifespan of the system? HTML5 by itself does not give you easy solutions. Building from scratch may not be an option, but accepting sub par UX should never be an option.
Java has been the trusted engine for most businesses for a long time. Over the time its conservative development has turned the attention to other languages running on JVM. Fortunately Java 8 has succeeded in adapting some of the best ideas from them and continues to provide the most balanced and proven platform for business apps today. The two giants, HTML5 and JVM are very different from each other. They fill different needs. They have different strengths. By harnessing their strengths with Vaadin, you can easily build the UX that enables you to win.