Vaadin VS Play

But how do we explain the complexity of the current toolset? This is where the Law of the instrument kicks in: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.". Even if JavaScript was born in the web, JavaScript centered frameworks do not fit properly in the web. That is why we have huge bundles of JavaScript, that is why RSC are necessary (things like RSC were already a thing in Vaadin) and that is how JavaScript became the Birmingham screwdriver.

Off-topic but this blog is using https://vaadin.com, that's the first time I am seeing this framework being used!

But there are frameworks like GWT or Vaadin for Java, but none of them really took off afaik, I've never seen a job posting with either of these.

This small tutorial takes 15 minutes from the start to a working demo. We use Picovoice Porcupine Wake Word Engine to enable a Vaadin-based Java web application.

Are you a long-time Java developer using Spring-related tech stack? Vaadin can bring a fresh brief of the air into your daily development routines.

It’s been 7 years since we deployed our first Vaadin app for production. The whole process has been more than interesting. We developed the application according to an analysis (several modules for the agenda in the field of local government) based on a verbal assignment. The customer started testing on our server and after 2 months found only 3 bugs and requested 2 modifications beyond the original brief. Once implemented, we installed it at the customer’s site. The application started for the first time and is still running :-).

> Slightly off topic, but I found JSF the most productive out of any framework.

In my experience, it has been a horrible technology (even when combined with PrimeFaces) for complex functionality.

When you have a page that has a bunch of tabs, which have tables with custom action buttons, row editing, row expansion, as well as composite components, modal dialogs with other tables inside of those, various dropdowns or autocomplete components and so on, it will break in new ways all the time.

Sometimes the wrong row will be selected, even if you give every element a unique ID, sometimes updating a single table row after AJAX will be nigh impossible, other times the back end methods will be called with the wrong parameters, sometimes your composite components will act in weird ways (such as using the button to close a modal dialog doing nothing).

When used on something simple, it's an okay choice, but enterprise codebases that have been developed for years (not even a decade) across multiple versions will rot faster than just having a RESTful API and some separate SPA (that can be thrown out and rewritten altogether, if need be).

Another option in the space is Vaadin which feels okay, but has its own problems: https://vaadin.com/

Of course, my experiences are subjective and my own.

Did you find an excellent custom element that would make sense in your Vaadin Java web application? Maybe that is a web component that you previously published yourself in npmjs.com?

My major complain here is that, as far as being a web framework there is precious little information here about the framework. How does this framework scale with multiple requests? What concurrency strategy is it using (threads, processes, actors, etc?). Is this opinionated (it doesn't seem so but it also doesn't say it isn't either). How does this work with popular libraries x,y,z. The full docs have a little bit more information, but not a ton. But mostly there are some cute toy examples and "built in python" and thats about it.

Lets compare this with for example play https://www.playframework.com/ I know from this that it built on Akka, its stateless, aims for predictable resource consumption, has non-blocking io, etc. There is a ton of really important information on what does this web framework actually do that is really important when you are making a choice of a framework.

I have no idea how good this framework is, but besides a few toy examples, I can't see anything that makes me thing "wow this is great I need to use this".

A web application framework for Java/Scala: https://www.playframework.com/

Scala 3 migration isn't as simple as migrating other apps, you can track the work at https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/11260

And there are frameworks you can use to make development easier, like Play. And Java has plenty of choices for dependency injection frameworks.

However do note, Play should be perfectly usable as well, and it's still maintained by the community: https://github.com/playframework/playframework/issues/11649

In university I learned a bit of Java, so maybe I could use it professionally I guess?. There were many options to choose from. DropWizard, Spark, Play Framework. But the more documented one in the internet I found was Springboot, besides there were some courses in spanish and some friends that knew something about Springboot, so I give it a chance.

For a backend web server I use Play - https://www.playframework.com/ which I find to be the easiest one as a backend web server. For learning/using spark I found this course from coursera to be very useful. https://www.coursera.org/learn/scala-spark-big-data