Vaadin Framework is a Java Web UI Framework for Business Applications which is productive as well as easy-to-use UI library for developing web applications in both Java & JVM language. It provides high-level UI components in order to save you from time-consuming HTML, CSS, and JavaScript programming. Vaadin framework abstracts almost all web technologies which give component based UI to build traditional desktop applications.

Vaadin framework also abstracts the communication of server & browser. It uses object oriented approach to improvise your UI small components & layouts to event listener UI. It makes & enhances both UI & backend development easy for the web developers. Vaadin framework is one of the best open-source web UI frameworks for Internet applications. It features server side architecture by running a majority of the development logic on the servers such as Javascript libraries & browser plugin solutions.

It also offers Ajax technology to run on browser side that ensures interactive user experience. On the client side, it is extended with google web toolkit which is a set of open source tools that allows the developer to maintain & create complete complex Java applications as well as java script front end apps in Java.

New Feature & Enhancements in Vaadin Framework 8

1. Bootstrapping:

Creating a Vaadin application by using Maven archetypes. start.spring.io offers the great option for Vaadin dependencies to spring projects. Netbeans & Eclipse IDEs also contains full support plugins to create Vaadin applications. We can access current VaadinSession, VaadinService, and VaadinServlet objects as well as reference UI object. It helps to create a simple app using the following command with same groupId and archetypeId in IDE.

Vaadin Components

Vaadin components define both field & layout as well as other component classes with their inheritance structure. Vaadin component properties define the interface as well as the base class for all Vaadin projects.

Vaadin Component Properties

Visible Property: It defines the component visibility with setting default true.

Locale Property: It defines the current country as well as language for the components.

Enabled Property: It defines the component gray in the false set & doesn’t allow user interaction.

Caption Property: It offers label inside the component depending upon the layout

Description Property: It defines the description displayed on the component while hovering the mouse over it.

Layout Components

The Vaadin UI layout is built from layout components as well as component containers. It offers interacting components as the leaf nodes. We can create root layout by setting UI content with setContent(). While, adding components to addComponent(), Single-component containers, such as Panel and Window holds a single UI content component.

The sizing of layout components is very crucial for default sizes and can be changed by using sizing methods. When components having relative layout size in a particular direction then the layout may not have the undefined size in that particular direction. Hence we can also use declarative HTML format as well as Vaadin Designer inside Eclipse to enhance view layout.

Vaadin Themes

Vaadin framework allows customization as well as the appearance of the UI with themes. Vaadin themes include Sass or CSS style sheets & Graphics with custom layout HTML templates. Vaadin customizable themes are placed under the /VAADIN/themes/ folder of the web application. The Vaadin web app folder specifies static resources with specific Vaadin application.

Read Complete Vaadin Framework 8 : Java Web UI Framework with Enhanced Features