— Devrim's Tech Stuff

Finally there! Vaadin -Godsend, on GWT & Google App Engine

Throughout my professional life, I suffered from one thing the most: being able to find good front end developers. In plain English, designers and JS gurus.

Main problem is that we come from different schools. Designers and engineers. They see the world from totally different angle. It is very hard to find a designer that meets the deadlines, understands the backend code and mingles with the rest of the team. And it is equally hard to find a developer who can also design.

Well, some may agree some may disagree, but the fact remains that in order to make one web application you need to make 2 applications written in totally different languages. You choose one for the backend, and you choose Javascript for the frontend.

Not anymore. Not long ago, i had a look at Google Web Toolkit and I made the mistake of thinking that it’s just a JS writer for non-JS people, I was terribly wrong. And very recently I found out Vaadin, and I fell in love with it.

It unifies the whole process of developing a web application. All you ever need is Java developers. You write Java code, using their wonderful components, it compiles it into a web application using Google Web Toolkit, for all the browsers (no browser compatibility CSS/JS is needed).

Your application is ready without ever touching DOM elements. You can deploy to Google App Engine, where up to 5 million visits per month will be free of charge, so you are totally free of deployment worries too.

I’m looking forward to developing my first Vaadin App, and I am seriously considering porting Kodingen to Vaadin.

Let’s see. I hope my feelings won’t change after I actually use it!

Ps: here is an idol of the designer type that I’m talking about, Stephan Sagmeister. As beautiful as that logo is on the video; engineer can’t make a software that takes  points, rotate a logo and be satisfied that they have solved an actual problem knowing those precisely generated points are as good as random points!

Google App Engine Overview:

Google Web Toolkit :