vaadin add-ons

[Christopher Brind]

Hi,

When we had our initial chat over Skype Peter (I think) talked about how you have to recompile an add-on before you can use it.  I didn't understand at the time, sorry Peter, but having tried to use an add-on in a Google App Engine (GAE) project I'm doing I now understand exactly what you were getting at.

The easiest way to use a Vaadin Add-On is to have the Vaadin Eclipse Plugins already installed.  

I already had my GAE project setup and was adding Vaadin as an after thought, tbh.  So I created a Vaadin project containing the same package that I wanted to build the widgets for and dropped the Jar for the add-on in question in to the classpath of the project.  The Vaadin Eclipse tools prompt to automatically recompile the widget set and away it goes.  A few minutes later (GWT is slow!) the new widget set is ready.

Once complete, I then copied the new widget set and supporting files to my existing GAE project, updated the web.xml to include the widget set and it worked.

When I want to use a new add-on I'll just do the same thing again in the widget project I created.

So with regards to OSGi this could indeed be problematic as Peter was suggesting.

Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Chris

[Neil Bartlett]

Chris, I think you're right. Customising widget sets means
Java->JavaScript compilation as per GWT, so you have the same issues
with modules as you do in GWT. Therefore it's unlikely you'll ever be
able to, say, dynamically deploy widget sets using OSGi.

On the other hand we can still modularise and dynamically deploy the
application modules, most of which will not contain any widget
customisations. So this is still a big win over "raw" GWT, I believe.

[Christopher Brind]

Yes, I agree with that for sure. :)

[Neil Bartlett]

Okay you can stop the "I agree with Neil" thing now!

[Sorry guys... UK political in-joke ;-) ]

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 10:22 AM, Christopher Brind