Vaadin, as we all know is a rapidly growing GWT based Java Web Framework. The coolest feature of Vaadin is that there is no client/server concept as it is in GWT. The developer can freely code anything "anywhere" and Vaadin will handle all the client/server related stuffs.
One of our existing in-house production application is built using GWT and causing lot of difficulties for developers in terms of understanding the model and designing the proper application. So to retain all the GWT features and offload the additional burdens we (as such I) have decided to move to the Vaadin and redesign the existing application.
To convince the technical and management team and for demonstration purpose I developed a small application in Vaadin and uploaded it to the Google Application Engine (click here) so that others can also get the idea and at the same time I can load test the application and get all the execution details from the App Engine dashboard.
The application contains a simple functionality where in which the user can design her custom entry forms, enter/save form data and finally view the saved data in a table. The application was built in few hours only so it doesn't have "next big ground breaking idea" or the nice GUI but Vaadin provides fairly nice UI which can work for any application to start with.
To speed up the development I extended the basic Form functionality to a Generic Form so that UI Forms can be created not only from Java Beans but from java.util.Map also. The reason to choose this is because some of our applications are purely data centric where in which numbers of UI forms are presented to users; however the fields in every form can very even after application deployment so to reduce the repetitive development effort I have taken the model where in which forms not only can be generated at runtime but can behave line a normal pre-coded form in most of the cases.
There are still many points to resolve before we finally switch over to Vaadin as our web application development framework but with the growing popularity of the framework and new initiative like Vaadin Directory acceptance would not be much difficult.
Vaadin demo application url: http://vaadincoolapp.appspot.com/
