All hail Vaadin...

After years of being creeped out by seeing the piles of Vaadin books a the JavaOne pavilion, I finally attended a presentation.

It's actually pretty cool.

Vaadin is a server-side framework for web-based UI applications. It basically wraps GWT, and lets you do a lot of cool stuff on the server side and very quickly generate the client UI. The presenter was using JRebel to redeploy his classes - basically, hit the refresh button the browser and the new version of the UI was available. That's another product I need to look at.

Plus, Vaadin has a ton of plugins and a pretty active user community. They make it easy to package custom components, and encourage users to upload them to their plugin repository.

One of the available plugins is an iPad/iPhone LAF.

Check it out - Apache licensed, free, open source: http://vaadin.com