We’re seeing an explosion of video content. Platforms such as Udacity and Udemy are very popular. Recently, Packt Publishing also started producing and selling videos for developers. This post reviews their video on Vaadin.
Building a Rich Internet Application with Vaadin is about 2 hours long and covers everything from setting up Eclipse to use Vaadin to some pretty advanced topics, such as creating a custom widget.
Mikolaj Olszewski shows the best practices in creating a Vaadin application. Because this is done by developing an actual application it’s very hands-on and practical. For that reason, it’s a great addition to the free Book of Vaadin, which is set up more like a reference and not so much an introduction.
Initially I tried to follow along with the video and type the code as it was shown. This was fine for the first 4 or 5 chapters, but became impossible later on. especially in the custom widget videos.
Personally, I would have preferred that the code parts where a little slower so that I could follow along. But I can imagine that some people prefer to download the code and work from that. A neatly organized package of all the code for each chapter is available.
The different chapters each deal with a different subject. Putting components and fields in a layout, styling them, connecting the fields to the Vaadin data model, session handling, etc. It’s all clearly explained and the learning curve is exactly right.
It’s only in the final section on custom widgets that went a little too fast. Obviously you can look up the details in the book of Vaadin, but that was not required to follow along the rest of the videos.
This video was produced in September, right around the time the new Valo theme was released. Valo is a major improvement over previous themes so it would have been nice if there was a small extra video added to discuss it.
Overall, if you want a quick introduction to get up to speed with Vaadin in half a day, this is the place to start.
And if you’re quick you can get it for $5. Packt is running a promotion until January 6th 2015.