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by Marc Logemann.
Original Post: Our prototype will be written in ... Vaadin
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As described in my last blog post, i checked some GWT based implementations for creating our products next generation admin console. I tried hard to compare all the pros and cons of the threee (SmartGWT, ExtGWT and Vaadin) frameworks. I dont want to go deeper into my decission matrix but at the end i decided on Vaadin. Of course its only a prototype and the decission is not final with regard to our re-engineering mission but there is a small advantage for Vaadin at this point. As long as our engineers dont start a hunger strike, we will favor Vaadin.
We only settled on Vaadin for about 2 days and our current state is just a layout prototype but it feels nice so far. We started a new theme of course because corporate identity is of some importance for us. I made some comments of our first hours on Twitter.
One thing that is really striking and this has nothing to do with Vaadin but more with the GWT approach, is that you can forget about HTML and JS. When you read a statement like this, people normally think "ok, thats a little advantage, whats more..." but if you really code something in plain java and get a descent UI in html, you will never look back. I ve done all the things you do in web development since 1993 including plain html, custom JS, advanced JS frameworks like JQuery but as long as you are not a web designer, this feels so annoying. And believe me, grabbing 23 JQuery plugins is not the way to go for RIA projects. JQery, Dojo & Co. are useful but IMO not for enterprise RIA apps. I dont say that you cant do it with these frameworks, but the effort is hughe and thats a matter of fact.
For sure, Vaadin is not the silver bullet for everything and they need to catch up a bit on the amount of widgets/components but IMO they have a good foundation and a well designed API. The only risk is that they are not IBM. But companies with good products dont die that fast :-)
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