Developing modern web-apps with Vaadin @ UNL
We started explaining what it means to develop a client-server application nowadays, and then some key features of the platform, like the lack of need of browser plugins and the fact that it is completely open-source.
Then we introduced Web Components, a key technology, that is the ground base for the good looking components that are built-in in the platform. Also some introduction for Polymer Project. For more information about these technologies, we recommend reading about it in the WebComponents official site, the Polymer Project official site, and also at Vaadin's site.
Then we started talking about Flow, the Java API for creating modern web-apps using Vaadin's components in the client side. We showed some small examples covering the most significant features like server side DOM manipulation, routing, data binding and synchronization.
If you want to learn more about Flow, the official documentation site is a good place to start.
Finally we developed a small application using Flow, showing how easy is to create a good looking web application that can edit data from a back end using Grid, one of the most advanced components.
After the speech, the students were interested in knowing more about the framework and some real life examples. So we decided to upload to GitHub the application that we developed in front of the audience. We added some tags that show each step in the process, feel free to download the sources and try modifying it to cover other use cases!
We also recommended another article that we wrote, telling the main steps for developing a complete application that covers how to invoke external REST APIs from the server side.
The experience was great and we found a lot of interest in the framework, so probably we are going to repeat the presentation again soon in another place.
Keep in touch with us for updates!