Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI. • Hacker News Board

Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#1

Post by huyng » Tue, Jun 02, 2009, 9:27 PM UTC

Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.
vaadin.com

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#2

Post by ianbishop » Tue, Jun 02, 2009, 11:08 PM UTC

It seems like the 'Cappuccino' of the GWT.

Edit: It even has a multi-platform 'nib2cib': "WYSIWYG user interface editor under Eclipse"

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#3

Post by huherto » Tue, Jun 02, 2009, 11:22 PM UTC

This looks great. So far I have used ext-gwt, but I stopped because they changed a year ago their license. Felt like a bait and switch. This sort of product is badly needed on GWT to completely kick ass. Also take a look at SmartGwt.

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#4

Post by huyng » Tue, Jun 02, 2009, 11:28 PM UTC

I'm looking deeply into solid frameworks for developing rich cross platform apps. So far this looks promising as well as Capuccino. The killer feature for me is this table widget implementation http://demo.vaadin.com/sampler/#Components/Table%20%28Grid%2...

Here is the HelloWorld tutorial: http://vaadin.com/tutorial

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#5

Post by bravura » Wed, Jun 03, 2009, 12:11 AM UTC

It looks good, but I don't see any demos that involve graphics. How usable is Vaadin for graphics?

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#6

Post by huyng » Wed, Jun 03, 2009, 12:48 AM UTC

bravura wrote: post #5

It looks good, but I don't see any demos that involve graphics. How usable is Vaadin for graphics?

According to this example: http://demo.vaadin.com/Coverflow/ It seems like you can add custom widgets easily. In this app they started using a Flash Widget for custom graphics.

I'm not a GWT developer, does anyone have any experience adding custom GWT/Vaadin widgets to your applications?

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#7

Post by hello_moto » Wed, Jun 03, 2009, 2:09 AM UTC

Be aware that the paradigm of Vaadin (known as IT Mill Toolkit) is leaning toward server-side. GWT is 100% client-side (plus RPC).

My guess is that Vaadin did a bit of UI rendering (prep-ing the HTML) on server-side then send it to client.

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#8

Post by hello_moto » Wed, Jun 03, 2009, 2:12 AM UTC

huherto wrote: post #3

This looks great. So far I have used ext-gwt, but I stopped because they changed a year ago their license. Felt like a bait and switch. This sort of product is badly needed on GWT to completely kick ass. Also take a look at SmartGwt.

Ext-GWT is a hell when it comes to widget customization. Also the API prevents it to be extensible.

From my personal experience (very very tiny data point), most of these "beautiful" GWT frameworks are good only if you want to wipe out something fast and don't mind with the default look.

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#9

Post by DenisM » Wed, Jun 03, 2009, 2:44 AM UTC

hello_moto wrote: post #7

Be aware that the paradigm of Vaadin (known as IT Mill Toolkit) is leaning toward server-side. GWT is 100% client-side (plus RPC). My guess is that Vaadin did a bit of UI rendering (prep-ing the HTML) on server-side then send it to client.

That was my impressin too. Are they trying to erase the boundary between the server and the client? If that's the case it's a terribly misguided thing to do...

Re: Vaadin - GWT with a skinnable UI.

#10

Post by goodkarma » Wed, Jun 03, 2009, 2:48 AM UTC

Between this and GWT (and the Google Wave app they are going to open source), I'm getting pretty interested in Java and using tools like GWT to just generate all of the javascript etc. It almost sounds like it will be /easier/ than Ruby on Rails.

Is that crazy?