Vaadin VS Thymeleaf

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?

Thymeleaf is used for serving frontend resources in this service, and it has cache enabled for static resources based on content. Something like the following properties:

xmlns:th="http://www.thymeleaf.org"> th:text="${title}">Product List th:each="product : ${products}" th:text="${product.name}">

*with Thymeleaf and SpringSecurity 6 to build a regular web application and it uses Authgear to **add authentication with the login page

Finally, we will create a HomeController to make the test effect more visually significant by controlling the content displayed on the page. We will display different information according to the role and use the thymeleaf template engine to render.

Finally, we create the Controller class and use the thymeleaf template engine to build the home page information. Different permission information sees different results in the home page list.

Configure all requests here to require authentication and authorization, provide Form form authentication methods, and customize the login template through thymeleaf. The code here is not within the scope of this article, and the following will not Show specific details.

Then let's define the html page, here we use the thymeleaf template engine:

You can also use SSR (Server Sided Rendering) to generate the front end before it is returned, reducing the need for JS. Thymeleaf is an example of that.

You can use Java for Backend and Frontend. A relative new kid on the block for Frontend is Qute. The general keyword you are searching for is Java Templating Engine. Specific examples would be Thymeleaf or FreeMarker. There are some framework, which offer a lot more than templating like Vaadin or Wicket. Some are just specifications like Jakarta Faces with some of their implementations MyFaces or Mojarra.