Chapter 7. Customizing UI Components – Time to Theme it

The example applications you have developed so far look really cool thanks to the out-of-the-box styles in Vaadin. However, you can dress your applications with your own style! Would you like to have a panel with a modern shadowing look? What about hovering effects for table rows? You can do all these things and more with Vaadin. CSS, and Sass enable Vaadin developers to customize the way components look on the browser by defining rules that change the styles used by the HTML tags being rendered. This chapter will teach you the basics of CSS and Sass and will show you how to style UI components by creating new Vaadin themes.

This chapter will cover the following topics:

• Vaadin themes

• CSS and Sass

• Firebug and Chrome inspector

• Styling labels

• Styling text fields

• Styling buttons

• Styling panels

• Styling menus

• Styling tables

It's time to theme it! With no more preambles, let's go ahead and start characterizing Vaadin applications by giving them their...