Skip to main content

Vaadin meetup

I attended Vaadin meetup with a few colleagues on a way to JFokus 2013 and thought I should share my notes of the two. First post is about vaadin meetup that took place on a cruise from Turku to Stockholm.

I made notes of three presentations and one of them I had high expectations. There were also two other presentations that I didn't make any notes of.

Vaadin 7


Vaadin released Vaadin 7 framework the same day that the meetup was on so they had a presentation where they told about new features and future plans. I'm more of a backend programmer than UI programmer so my notes of this were pretty brief but here it goes.

Whats new

  • Servlets and HTTP-sessions are controllable by the programmer
  • Multiple UI classes
    • e.g. One for web browsers and one for mobile web browsers
  • GWT is now build-in
  • Support for external JavaScript modules

What to expect in the future

  • Faster relase cycles
    • maintenance release every two weeks
  • Dynamic CSS injection
  • Vaadin CDI, their own depency injection system
  • Vaadin charts, for drawing nice charts

ePalo


This was a project ordered by Helsinki university and it was developed by a company called Arcusys. It's some sort of feedback system. The interesting part of this presentation was why they chose Vaadin framework for the UI. They chose it because it could programmed with Java or Scala and the developers didn't need to have any knowledge of web technologies like HTML, CSS or JavaScript.

Modern software development anti-patterns


Martijn Verburg, Diabolocal developer, had a presentation of software development anti-patterns. This the presentation that I really wanted hear he also had the same presentation later at JFokus. I had high hopes for this presentation and it didn't let me down. I'm just going to write a few buzzwords and notes here and the rest is available on Martijns slides and video filmed at the meetup.
  • Mortage-driven development
    • Write code to pay your mortage and make sure anyone else can't understand your code
  • Distracted by shine
    • Always use the latest and greatest
  • The deity
    • Huge classes e.g. Java class with 140k lines
Those were anti-patterns but he also gave tips how to avoid anti-patterns. 

One of the things he said is something in my opinion every developer should understand and remember. The anti-pattern was CV++ meaning that you try all the new frameworks and tools just so you can put a new line in your CV when instead you should be good at the principles.

So what does that mean. It means know the principles of software developent because languages, frameworks and tools change and evolve all the time but if you know hte principles you can always learn a new language or learn howto use a framework you haven't used before.

All the presentations of Vaadin meetup were filmed and uploaded to youtube. Links can be found at Vaadin meetup website https://vaadin.com/meetup/jfokus-2013.

On the next two posts I'll be what I learned in JFokus 2013.

Labels:

Popular posts from this blog

Simple code: Naming things

There are two hard things in programming and naming is one them. If you don't believe me ask Martin Fowler https://www.martinfowler.com/bliki/TwoHardThings.html . In this post I'll be covering some general conventions for naming things to improve readability and understandabilty of the code. There are lots of things that need a name in programming. Starting from higher abstractions to lower we need to name a project, API or library, we probably need to name the source code repository, when we get to the code we need to name our modules or packages, we give names to classes, objects, interfaces and in those we name our functions or methods and within those we name our variables. Overall a lot of things to name. TLDR; Basic rule There's a single basic convention to follow to achiveve better, more descriptive naming of things. Give it a meaningful name i.e. don't use shorthands like gen or single letter variables like a, x, z instead tell what it represents, what it does...
Read more

Simple code: Version control commits

Currently the most popular version control system is git and I'll be writing this based on git and it's functionalities and capabilities. Git is often seen as a way to enable distributed programming i.e. multiple programmers can work on the same code repository quite easily without disturbing each others work (much). In addition to that just like other VCS's it's also a log of work but to my experience that part is often unfortunately neglected. What I will be focusing this time is the log part because I think it deserves more attention. Why to create a meaningful log? The git log should consist from small meaningful changesets where each commit addresses a single problem. By dividing the log to small commits it enables resilient way of working. Being resilient enables simple and fast procedures to rollbacks, reviews, tags, branching etc. Lets say that a developer is implementing a REST API. The API needs a web layer that receives the HTTP requests, it probably has some...
Read more

Simple code: Simplicity

Simplest solutions are usually the best solutions. We as software developers work with hard problems and solve a lot of small problems every day. Solving a hard problem itself is a hard job. Though in my opinion it's not enough to solve a hard problem in any possible way but a hard problem should be solved with a simple solution. When a developer comes up with a simple solution to a hard problem then they can declare the problem solved. First a disclaimer. Coming up with a simple solution to a hard problems is itself a very hard problem and takes a lot of time, effort and practice. I've seen my share of "clever" solutions for hard problems and the problem with those is that usually the solution itself is so hard to understand that depending on the size of the problem it may take a developer from hours to days or even weeks to understand how that "clever" solution works. It's a rare occasion when a developer has come up with a simple solution to a hard pr...
Read more