When I wrote the first version of Learning Vaadin, I hinted at how to integrate Vaadin with the Spring framework (as well as CDI).
I only described the overall approach by providing a crude servlet that queried the Spring context to get the Application instance.
At the time of Learning Vaadin 7, I was eager to work on add-ons the community provided in terms of Spring integration. Unfortunately, I was sorely disappointed, as I found only few and those were lacking in one way or another. The only stuff mentioning was an article by Petter Holmström - a Vaadin team member (and voluntary fireman) describing how one should do to achieve Vaadin & Spring integration. It was much more advanced than my own rant but still not a true ready-to-be-used library.
So, when I learned that both Vaadin and Spring teams joined forces to provided a true integration library between two frameworks I love, I was overjoyed. Even better, this project was developed by none other than Petter for Vaadin and Josh Long for Pivotal. However, the project was aimed at achieving DI through auto-wiring. Since JavaConfig makes for a cleaner and more testable code, I filled an issue to allow that. Petter kindly worked on this, and in turn, I spent some time making it work.
The result of my experimentation with Spring Boot Vaadin integration has been published on morevaadin.com, a blog exclusively dedicated to Vaadin.