RL026 Ville Ingman (Vaadin) - Radio Liferay Episode 26

Radio Liferay

At this year's Jax I met Ville Ingmann, "Your Business Buddy" at Vaadin (the business card says "VP of German Operations"). With some inadvertent background noise (sorry) we talk about the history of Vaadin in Liferay, the meaning of the name, which also explains the logo, and the integration of Vaadin in Liferay (Vaadin is technology partner of Liferay, the library comes bundled with your Liferay installation and is available in the "New Project" wizard of Liferay IDE).

We talk about

• Turku, Finland
• When to use Vaadin vs. the other available technologies
• How Vaadin differs from GWT (hint: GWT is used for front-end UI rendering, but generally processes server-side
• A performance comparison and benchmarks that have been executed with Vaadin - and how it will change further with Server-Push in Vaadin 7.1
• The Devoxx-Talk "World Wide Wait" included Vaadin in its comparison as the fastest server-side solution.
• Vaadin recently released version 7 which is a huge step forward, unfortunately not 100% backward compatible with the version that ships with Liferay (6.x) but 6.x continues to be maintained. The backward compatibility for version 7 depends on the technology used by the applications, for regular applications it should be ok though.
• Arcusys, a Liferay Partner in Finland, picked up the development for the Vaadin controlpanel
• Vaadin is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, despite the main product being available for free (like Liferay), Vaadin has built quite a good business around the product. The company is sized at ~60 employees, offering services, consulting, training and some extra components that we briefly talk about.
• Eating your own dogfood vs. drinking your own champagne.
• Vaadin supports SASS and integrates easily with external javascript
• Widgets
• The Vaadin repository is hosted on github - go ahead, fork and collaborate

Follow Ville, RadioLiferay or me on twitter
Thanks a lot to Auphonic for improving the sound quality drastically - this is the first episode I had processed by them and it's been a really good experience - especially given the recording cirumstances.