Vaadin is a Rich Internet Application framework in Java that let developers code applications in a very productive way. For more information regarding Vaadin, please consult its site.
When one wants to learn a framework, one needs to read some documentation. In this regard, Vaadin provides plenty resources:
- A 5-minutes tutorial
- A long one-hour tutorial
- The famous Book of Vaadin, which is also available as a ready-to-print PDF
- Vaadin’s API
- A RefCardz to keep it all in mind
This amount of documentation and its level of quality is rarely seen in OpenSource projects. However, I do think there’s a missing link since the book’s intended audience is developers who will "just" code.
But my experience taught me many will want to go beyond that and understand the big picture as well as nitty-gritty implementation details. In order to provide just this kind of information, I’ve begun the writing of a Learning Vaadin book with Packt Publishing, since I believe Vaadin can be be for the presentation layer what Spring was for Java EE: an excellent productivity-oriented tool that ease development. "Learning Vaadin" targets developers who start from the very beginnings but want to deeply understand what they do.
I got excellent working relationship with the Vaadin’s team as well as the support of Joonas Lehtinen, Vaadin’s fater (thanks Joonas for answering my many questions). Book reviews will be done by members of Vaadin’s team.
Writing is well underway, having written 5 draft chapters on a total of 10. You can support me in this new challenge by acquiring a copy of the book when it’s delivered (exp. Jan. 2012) or if you can’t wait, the ebook in RAW (draft) mode is available now! Note that since Vaadin is OpenSource, Packt will pay royalties to the project itself.