Vaadin

It’s an Interesting name. Isn’t it. I was searching about open source web frameworks, when I came across Vaadin. Vaadin is a RIA framework build on top of GWT (Google web toolkit). Started learning it with the address book tutorial . I must say, it’s a very impressive tutorial. Next step was to installed Vaadin plugin in eclipse and to create a CRUD application. I kept Vaadin as front end, and Hibernate in spring DAO at the model layer. It took me a while for achieving it. But application was running very smooth. You create your UI windows(pages) using Java API of Vaadin, much like the way you have programmed for your swing applications. At run time, your code gets compiled into java script code. Vaadin provides large set of out of box UI components which can fulfills most of the requirements of your web page. API for Vaadin is well documented and Vaddin book is also avaliable.

To me Vaadin with Hibernate and Spring Dao seems to be a good choice for creating web application for your startup. But still java world miss a light weight web framework which covers all the tiers/layers of the web application. Or might be Java is not at all a platform to create small and mid scale web applications. Time to explore PHP frameworks :)