Ryan graduated from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China in 2006 and started his Java journey. He has been working as a software developer for more than 16 years, providing software solutions for the government, insurance companies, fin-tech companies, and banks. Also, Ryan is the owner of WontLost Ltd providing web application consultancy and development, and one of the 2022 Vaadin Community Award winners!
What type of projects are you currently working on?
Currently, I work on web applications using Vaadin, Spring Boot/Quarkus.
How did you get into Java development?
Well, I got into Java development by coincidence. I studied C/C++ at University but joined a company where Java was widely used. Then I started learning Java development, including Java EE/Jakarta EE, Hibernate, Spring, and Struts. The more Java code I write, the more I like it.
How did you discover Vaadin and how was your "getting started" experience?
I was maintaining a product written in Vaadin at my previous company. That’s how I started to know Vaadin and its add-ons. With my experience using Swing and SWT, I found it much easier to get started developing using Vaadin. The comprehensive documents are very helpful!
You built some helpful components for the Vaadin directory, what was your inspiration behind these?
I benefited from the Vaadin directory with many useful open-source components. But some of the components lacked maintenance and became incompatible with newer Vaadin versions. From Vaadin 14, Lit was introduced. After researching Lit, I found it can be a connector between Vaadin and Javascript. Javascript plays a key role in web applications, but not every Java developer knows about Javascript. Then I started thinking of combining popular Javascript libraries, such as CKEditor and zxing, with Vaadin, and then the components came true. I keep updating them to fix bugs and enrich their functions, making them grow with Vaadin.
