November 2010 Meetup - Vaadin

A last minute change to the speaker and topic left us with an evening of Vaadin. What an evening it was! A massive thanks to Richard Kolb for stepping up and delivering a fantastic presentation. I was impressed not only by Vaadin, but also Richards delivery.

Vaadin is a Java framework built on GWT. It offers a whole host of UI components, and offers a simpler development model. As the Vaadin website puts it:

A few lines of Java code and Vaadin takes care of the rest. No complex configurations, no JavaScript.

It has an enthusiastic community providing add ons to the framework, covering most useful functionality you could think of.

If you're looking around for a Java web framework, Vaadin certainly warrants a close inspection. You can find out more about Vaadin here. The evenings slides are available here.

We were joined later in the evening by some foreign students from the Jumping Bean train the trainer course. It was really interesting to hear about some of the online distance education initiatives happening in Africa.

It was a great way to end the year. Thanks to all involved.