Vaadin 7 - Good framework but not for my project
java, session, vaadin7
Solution
It's a lot of questions. I don't have answers, but have some insights for You.
I've developed one and seen three web applications developed in Vaadin 6. All failed, the reasons were varied, but I can share with you some of my humble insights:
- Some Vaadin behaviors (at least 6.x) was hard to customize, e.g. session expiration.
- Resulting HTML was extremely heavy and hard to customize also. Often it was impossible for my team to achieve the desired visual effect.
- I found Vaadin's design quite poor (a lot of casting/ using `Object` instead of generics). Also source code is not high quality in my humble opinion.
- Built-in widgets are sometimes hard to use due to bugs and lack of real-world examples.
- Portability among browsers is a myth (especially IE, but You found out that already)
- Simple Vaadin app can take up a lot of CPU resources
Keep in mind also that Vaadin used in wrong way (not in Single Page App) becomes a nightmare - but is not a fault of framework itself. The same applies to any other tool.
Problem
Vaadin is a wonderful framework, It is very useful to develop colorful web apps. However, I'm totally frustrated by some unexpected things happening in it. I know it is hard to create such a framework where client and server side components can be coded at the same time. It saved me time. But, I don't know why I'm getting communication error, session expired notification, app freezes sometimes in the server environment. However, Everything works perfectly fine in my local environment. Can anyone please tell me why I'm facing these issues? Problems: - Communication Problem? (http://dev.vaadin.com/ticket/8466) - Session expired message? (I set the session to expire after 300 minutes. But it happens before. But, not all the time) - App freezes sometimes. (I can click buttons, But no use.. No actions.. Only way is to restart) - Very bad performance in IE. (I know it is common for all web apps. But, my application when compared to other browser; IE totally sucks. - Lazy loading in treetable will be really helpful for me. - ICEPush add-on, doing its job perfectly. But, after sometime it is giving me exception in the console.(https://vaadin.com/forum#!/thread/234493/4528542) - If I do any action in a browser. It is reflected in another browser(another instance of the application. (http://dev.vaadin.com/ticket/10208) - Context menu add-on: Easy to implement and fantastic. but, gives me exception on multiple right clicks on a slow network.https://vaadin.com/forum#!/thread/119996/4455717 - Annoying exception messages. what is the need to show it on the UI? I already spent most of my time in forums. I really got good support from you guys. But, I don't want to. I suspect the following things will be the reason for the above problems. - My Vaadin server is in UK and API server is in US, Is this a reason for the communication problem? - I build components from functions of a Util class. Is this the reason for the problem no 7 on my list. Like this, ComponentsBuilder.buildVerticalLayout();