Client side applications

We have seen how to create a composition of server-side UI components. This approach is good if you can rely on existing components. But, what if you need something new? What if you need a high responsive component that avoids going to the server too frequently? What if you need some fine-grained tuning on some UI component? The Vaadin client side framework is the tool to accomplish this kind of requirements.

Vaadin client framework is based on GWT, so everything you can do with GWT, you can do with Vaadin. In this section we are going to develop a pure client side application using the Vaadin client side framework.

Note

Explaining GWT would require a whole book. In fact, there are some really good books on the matter such as Google Web Toolkit 2 Application Development Cookbook by S. Ahammad and Google App Engine Java and GWT Application Development by D. Guermeur and A. Unruh. For our purposes, we are going to learn some fundamental aspects of GWT, but remember that...