Vaadin

Horrible. Only Vaadin partners and workers are giving 5 stars so it looks good. Stop scamming people, and stop faking these ratings, this will make you look even worse.

Written by Guest, 26th January, 2021

Many are in the 1-star or 5-star category, this shows passion and emotional responses and not scientific-practical answers, I would guess the 1-star group are Front end developers who are put down by the restrictive nature of Vaadin, and the 5 start group are backend engineers who are happy with Vaadin because it allowed them to write web apps without touching HTML, CSS, JS, ... etc.

Vaadin is good if you want to write applications that are exposed to a limited number of people since it stores the state of the UI in the server.

Pros of Vaadin:
--> Quickly write simple applications.
--> Seamless experience, you can really stick to Java and the rest will be handled by Vaadin.
--> Ability to create custom experience by leveraging the server state, for example I use stateful pages, where the page doesn't lose its data even you navigate away from it, great for users who are used to Swing/desktop applications.
--> Large library of components.
--> You can create nice application using the free version.

Cons of Vaadin:
--> You are abstracted away from the DOM, and experience dictates when there are many layers (for the sake of simplicity) those layers will bite you by restricting and imposing ways of doing things.
--> Initial coding is required to establish a framework over Vaadin as it has written so much code to create their framework, but that framework is only about client-server communication and rendering of components which are basically Pojo, but the way you want to structure your code inside the Java side relies on you, if you don't create a framework of MVC/MVP/MVVM/ODUI, you will end maintaining a messy code, so Vaadin for large applications needs time.
--> State is preserved on the server which means a larger footprint on the memory.
--> IMO Vaadin didn't master the art of backward compatibility, v7 broke v6 apps, v8 did that to v7, and Flow (the newest and most modern one which doesn't relay on GWT) broke all the previous versions, so layers of abstractions is needed.

Written by Guest, 13th January, 2021

Just started using Vaadin for an application we're prototyping. Love it. I'm a backend dev with not much creativity and talent for frontend. This framework suits me extremely well and I was able to get a basic app up and running within an hour. The videos are invaluable to getting to started.

Written by Guest, 1st December, 2020

Somebody mention it and tried to work with it in a small project. Horrible!

I recommend using Bootstrap 4 instead, much nicer components and easy to use.

Written by Guest, 25th November, 2020

It is a great framework, ideal for developing corporate applications and intranets quickly. I do not recommend it for developing stunning websites. Its disadvantage is that it consumes a lot of resources and is somewhat slow, much more in version 14. I recommend using version 8.

Written by Guest, 7th September, 2020

Most of the 5-starts here are written by Vaadin marketing. They just want to sell their overpriced products.

The actual framework is rubbish. After Vaadin broke most of our apps we had invested months in we ditched the framework and haven't been more happy. Don't buy into their marketing jargon about simplicity, if you do anything larger than a simple "hello world" type app you do not want to use this framework.

Written by Guest, 31st May, 2020

If you are used to use Swing you'll find very easy to create a web in Vaadin. In my case I find it the easiest and fastest framework to create a web.

Written by Guest, 19th April, 2020

It's not a perfect framework by any means, but it certainly gets the job done. A lot of people might be talking about how Vaadin is dead, but I can assure you it most certainly is not. My organization is just finishing building a pretty complex financial services app in Vaadin 14 and most things went off smoothly. Vaadin might have used dying/ dead technologies such as GWT in the past, but the newest lts is built using web components and (unfortunately) Polymer 2. However, I hear they are moving away from it soon, so fingers crossed.

Is it a silver bullet... I strongly disagree. However, if you are working on a project where your team mostly has Java developers (like ours), and prefer to run all the logic on the server (including the UI logic), it's a wonderful solution. We used one of the commercial licenses (I think the second highest tier), but most of the important functionality is available in the open source version. Our team wasn't overly familiar with Vaadin, so we needed the support, which is why we went for the commercial licenses.

Another thing it lacks, though, is excellent documentation. The current documentation is adequate, but far from exemplary. However, their support assures me that they are working to update their documentation in 2020.

Written by Guest, 8th April, 2020

Tried to write a simple CRUD type application with Vaadin and it is just horrible.

Bad APIs, styling is way too difficult, and well, understanding how the whole application will be bundled takes a mad scientist.

There are a million better ways of doing webapps, stay away from this.

Written by Guest, 17th February, 2020

Am working with this one. It is a worse framework. Everything needs to coded we don't know where exactly what's happening in the application. So I am strongly recommend don't use this.

Written by Guest, 20th November, 2019

Vaadin (6-8) was great when it was based on Google Web Toolkit. The whole stack was Java and it was easily adoptable by most developers and it was a stable base to build upon.

Vaadin 10 and forward (Vaadin Flow) is rubbish. It have been unstable and slow, and furthermore they have no backwards compatibility whatsoever, so if you write your application today you will have to fully refactor it when the next version comes out.

My recommendation is to stay away from the framework and instead use Spring Boot for the backend to provide a clean REST API and then write the frontend with some established javascript library like React/Vue/Angular.

Written by Guest, 30th October, 2019

Vaadin is making the application very heavy and slow. Additionally it doesn't support the Internet Edge browser.

Written by Guest, 8th December, 2018

Vaadin is an irresponsible scam. All positive reviews must be written by marketers or junior developers. Compiling Java code into JavaScript is a born-dead idea, produces non-debuggable mess. If you want to do any custom stuff, you are in big trouble with Vaadin. But if you want to learn serious front end app development, better learn JavaScript + HTML and some framework like React, Vue or Angular right away. It's a small effort but the reward is big. It's irresponsible that Vaadin keeps fooling new developers into this dead end from year to year. It's a trap. It looks nice in the beginning, making you initially think it will make you productive. After the wow effect your productivity will surely be bogged down when you run into strange errors that you have little control over.

Written by Guest, 22nd August, 2018

It is simply the opposite of it's description. Who is giving 5 stars is simply a Vaadin partner. Hardly not recommended.

Written by Guest, 20th July, 2018

Been using for over two years. Serious intranet app is on Vaadin. You want 'components'? Vaadin has had them for years. You can build some serious stuff. Some people giving one star found it 'unnecessarily complicated'. There is some of that. Spend a little time, and you will be cranking out apps, updating existing apps. Your stuff will be on time and solid.

Written by Guest, 2nd May, 2018

Easy to use and efficient. All of those not happy with it are probably Angular fanboys. It is very helpful for both Beginners and Seniors alike.

Written by Guest, 23rd August, 2017

Vaadin has some nice add-ons, but somehow nothing works out of box. Widgetsets, stylesheets, Java code, Ivy settings, deployment issues: too many dependencies that breaks too easily. Debugging is painful. UI development is very slow because all of this crap.

Written by Guest, 17th November, 2016

It is so cool as a young developer, cudos to the developers of this wonderful framework. Made things so easy for me to understand and learn.

Written by Guest, 29th July, 2016

It's just horrible. Nothing is logical in this framework, lack of coherence however it can guarantee horrible slow development and lots of bugs.

Written by Guest, 27th July, 2016

The worst web framework but one of best in marketing. I seriously don't want to believe any senior developer can choose this.

Written by Guest, 14th July, 2016

What a framework, takes complexities of client side programming out. I build my first UI application - that is fairly complex and used Vaadin. Took time to learn ropes of framework, but was amazed. Have some pages with multiple forms with exotic UI components, Grid (7.5.3)), Combobox, etc. all served from single Bean with nested beans. Databinding feature was one of the best. Data seriliazed all the way from ORM bean to the UI component with BeanItemContainer. No hardcoding of UI anywhere, same bean validators used - front end and back end, same beans, binding was breeze and worked like a charm.

Created my own generic form generator that sources off the bean - was so easy to create it since it is pure JAVA and all the tools like ease of factory creation, reflection are at your disposal. Now creating a form is matter of having right bean and derived form object for customisation if needed. Gave this framework to my PHP colleague, initially he was left footed on this and hated Vaadin, but slowly he realized that he has come out of dark ages.

We adopted Vaadin as we are moving towards liferay and Vaadin is well suited for Portlets.

I agree with others, documentation is excellent and any topic is well addressed on forums. You will never feel lost with Vaadin.

BTW companion library to use can be EventBus, gives more flexibilities in controlling hierarchical components.

Written by Guest, 7th September, 2015

As a Java developer who specialised in Swing, stumbling across Vaadin when researching what framework to use to port our legacy Swing app to a Web app was like a dream come true!

You will hit the ground running, and for the most part you really can forget about being in a Web environment (you will be spending 99.9% of your time coding in pure Java).

It is a very mature and stable product. The functionality is great, the looks are great, the documentation is great & the online community is great.

For web applications (ie not web sites)), I cannot recommend Vaadin enough.

Written by Guest, 27th April, 2015

Just code in pure Java and good community. The best framework for intranet apps. Great framework support to use legacy GWT projects.

Written by Guest, 5th January, 2015

Really thought out architecture than frees you up from all browser specific worries. Just code in pure Java!

Written by Guest, 27th April, 2014

Vaadin is one of the only ways to have a pro looking web application (not a website) and protect your logic through the server side coding.

Written by Guest, 21st March, 2014

Vaadin is the link that tie me up to Java. I never thought that JAVA could really be factible for professional bussiness. It´s incredible this software

Written by Guest, 27th February, 2014

Nothing beats Vaadin.
After working with JSP, Wicket, GWT & GXT, I realized that Vaadin is really the one framework that I always wanted.
askVikrant.com

Written by Guest, 29th November, 2013

Being a Flex Developer I find it unnecessarily complicated. Adjusting gaps, layouts everything is just made extra tough to understand

Written by Guest, 14th November, 2013

Vaadin is super cool, easy to learn and yes swing people are loving it. The IDE support is very good. One question though where have you been hiding this.

Written by Guest, 6th May, 2013

Vaadin is really a rapid application framework that can implement complex web applications. Learning curve is easy. Swing folks would really love this framework.

Written by Guest, 15th November, 2012