Getting started with Vaadin and Eclipse

Vaddin is a java framework for building modern web applications that looks good, perform well and make you and your users happy(The description of Vaadin from the official website). Unlike the frameworks such as GWT, JSF, Wicket, Vaddin programing is some like the traditional desktop framework, such Swing, AWT, it does not need the template page by default. Thus if you are familiar with one of the desktop frameworks, you can study Vaadin framework quickly..

In this tutorial, I will create a simple application with Eclispe IDE, and tomcat as deployment server.

I am also not a guru of the Vaddin framework, so you can follow me and we can learn it together.

Prerequisite

Before creating the application, you have to prepare the development environment.

1. Download Eclipse IDE from , choose the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers . Unzip it into your local disc.

2. Download Apache Tomcat from , I will use tomcat 6 as deployment application server in this tutorial. Extract it into your local disk. Optionally you can set TOMCAT_HOME environment variable and add TOMCAT_HOME/bin to your system path.

3. Install Vaddin Eclipse plugin from update site: .

Create a Vaddin project

1. Open Eclispe IDE, and click File from the main menu, choose New ->Others and open the New Project wizard dialog.

2. Select Vaddin->Vaddin Project(If you can not find this item, install Vaddin Eclipse Plugin firstly) in tree list, then click Next button.

3. In the “New Vaddin Project”, input a project name, and select Apache Tomcat 6 as the target runtime(if you did not use it in Eclipse, click the “New Runtime” button and follow the wizard to create a tomcat server instance). In the Vaddin version dropdown list, you can choose a vaaddin used in this project, if you does not find an option, click the Download and choose a version in the popup windows and click OK button, it will download the selected version of Vaadin jar archive from the remote server automatically. Click Next button.

4. Accept the default values of Java settings. Click Next button.

5. Accept the default values WebModule settings. Click Next button.

6. In the Vaadin project settings dialog, input the Application Name, package name, and Application Class name. Click Finish button to close the project creating wizard.

Run on Tomcat server

1. Right click the project node, select Run as-> Run on Server from the context menu.

2. In the opened dialog, make sure the Tomcat Server is selected(we selected Tomcat as deployment server in the creating phase, it would select it automatically).

3. Eclipse will open the default internal browser, and display the homepage of the application.

Next step, you should follow the tutorial from Vaadin official website to develop a real application, and read the reference documentation for further study.