Last week I delivered a session at Engage with Daniele Vistalli entitled Jedi and Sith: OpenNTF Domino API and CrossWorlds. The session covered different aspects related to developments within OpenNTF Domino API over the last year, one of which Nathan T Freeman covered in greater depth during his session entitled The Graph Revolution. It finally brought together a variety of new techniques into a demo application: the Tinkerpop extension within OpenNTF Domino API to bring graph databases to Domino, native development using Domino as a datasource on Websphere Liberty Profile with CrossWorlds, and the Java web development framework Vaadin. The use of Vaadin nicely fitted in with Rene Winkelmeyer’s session too. The slides from the presentation, including some screenshots of the demo application, are now available on the Engage website.
Working on the demo application has convinced me that Vaadin is the natural choice for a web development framework for XPages developers whose preference is Java (as opposed to JavaScript). Although there are some gotchas and I expect a number of “this was easier in XPages” moments, there are also some very nice benefits. A number we’ve already encountered in a small demo application are ease of resorting on the fly, a very nice and easy to populate calendar view including drag/drop (which can be very easily disabled), messages when a “partial refresh” is triggered but the session has expired etc.
It’s great to see some interest in the concepts covered already.
Just signed into @vaadin to learn more. @muenzpraeger @PaulSWithers and @DanieleVistalli turned me on 😀
— Oliver Busse ✫ (@zeromancer1972) April 5, 2015
Over the coming months, I’m sure I’ll be blogging more about the journey.
Paul, Could you expand a bit on why you feel Vaadin is a better fit than something like Richfaces or Primefaces that have the same base framework JSF?
I haven’t really looked at those alternatives. But Vaadin is open source, has excellent documentation, numerous easy to install samples, a host of addons, themes with natural class names, FontAwesome images, easy responsive layouts, server-side persistence, “partial refresh” without lifecycle gotchas, a visual editor for those who want it. But the main reasons for preference are an easy starter on Bluemix and that a number of our community have written blog posts or delivered sessions on it. And the certification exam is a proper test, all questions are checkbox multi-choice, with no hint on the number or answers expected.