Why should consider Vaadin for web framework,
Whenever I hear someone saying that GWT is way to go, since logic is in client side. I start immediately wondering what these people have been drinking. (1) Data, if application is handling any larger amounts of data, then processing of it must happen anyway in server side, (2) Security, well, ”logic is in client side”, translates ”application has builtin security holes”, (3) Scalability, GWT applications start to very quickly grow in size, requiring special tricks to avoid downloading whole app at once to client side. (side effect: it’s very easy to leak unwanted, possibly sensitive data into client side). Also this makes code sharing difficult between server vs. client side logic; to avoid undesired dependencies, same logic must be duplicated into both server and client codebase.
Since I’m not completely biased, I know that Vaadin has some defects, which are however not caused by the programming model, but rather implementation of how some things are done: (a) layouts, attempt to oversimplify concepts, causes overweight layout logic, which doesn’t work well across all browsers (Waiting for Vaadin 7a2…). (b) table and container model. Table logic is a bit overweight, but at the same time limited.
Update: 25.2.2012
Vaadin – Invient Charts looks actually rather nice, I could imagine some use for such.
References:
Who Is Using Vaadin?
Architecture – Decision Table
RIA Security – Broken By Design