Philipp Hauer's Blog

Engineering Management, Java Ecosystem, Kotlin, Sociology of Software Development

Vaadin

Vaadin 10+: SASS Integration and CSS Refresh during Development

Posted on Apr 15, 2019

Vaadin 10+: SASS Integration and CSS Refresh during Development

Since Vaadin 10, SASS is no longer supported out of the box. Fortunately, it’s really easy to integrate SASS in a Vaadin 10+ app and its Maven build. But how can we ensure a fast feedback cycle during the SASS development? Restarting the app is cumbersome. Even a page reload would reset the UI state, which leads to annoying clicking through the app. Luckily, there is an approach that automatically exchanges the changed CSS without any browser refresh or app restart.

Focus on Integration Tests Instead of Mock-Based Tests

Posted on Apr 1, 2019

Focus on Integration Tests Instead of Mock-Based Tests

Testing classes in isolation and with mocks is popular. But those tests have drawbacks like painful refactorings and the untested integration of the real objects. Fortunately, it’s easy to write integration tests that hit all layers. This way, we are finally testing the behavior instead of the implementation. This post covers concrete code snippets, performance tips and technologies like Spring, JUnit5, Testcontainers, MockWebServer, and AssertJ for easily writing integration tests. Let’s discover integration tests as the sweet spot of testing.

Self-Contained Systems in Practice with Vaadin and Feeds

Posted on May 16, 2018

Self-Contained Systems in Practice with Vaadin and Feeds

The term Microservices is quite vague as it leaves many questions unanswered. Contrarily, a Self-Contained Systems subsumes concrete recommendations and best practices that can guide you to create an application which is resilient and independent. But how can we implement such a system? At Spreadshirt, we build an application following the recommendations of a Self-Contained System. In this post, I’ll show you which technologies we used and which challenges we faced.

How to Increase Your JVM Development Productivity

Posted on Oct 22, 2017

How to Increase Your JVM Development Productivity

During development, it’s important to have fast feedback loops after code changes. Waiting for a cold restart of the application is not satisfying at all and slows down the development process. In this post, I show how we can reduce the turnaround time by using certain JVM arguments and class reloading. Besides those framework-independent means, I’ll give some tips for Vaadin and Spring Boot applications.

Kotlin in Practice with Spring Boot and Vaadin

Posted on Dec 21, 2016

Kotlin in Practice with Spring Boot and Vaadin

Coding with Kotlin is great fun. But things are getting really interesting when we try to use Kotlin in conjunction with popular frameworks like Spring Boot and Vaadin. The development with those frameworks can benefit a lot from Kotlin. However, we have to pay attention to some pitfalls.

Analyzing the Memory Usage of a Vaadin Application

Posted on Dec 17, 2015

Analyzing the Memory Usage of a Vaadin Application

Does your Vaadin application scale well? As Vaadin holds the UI state of every user on the server-side, the used server memory increases with every active user. So can our Vaadin application deal with an increased amount of users in terms of the used memory? We will find out! In this post I present tools and approaches to investigate the memory footprint of our Vaadin application.

Evaluating Vaadin: Strengths and Weaknesses

Posted on Feb 16, 2015

Evaluating Vaadin: Strengths and Weaknesses

Vaadin is a mature web framework for developing rich internet applications. Building web-based GUIs with Vaadin feels like developing a desktop application, which is great, comfortable and fast. However, there are situations where Vaadin is not suitable. In this article, we take a look at the architecture of Vaadin and point out its strengths and weaknesses. Let’s start.