Vaadin Café Finder demo

The Café Finder is a basic example of Vaadin Flow app, defining few views and routes, as well as introducing theming in the WebComponents era.

The skeleton is a Spring Boot app, packaged as a runnable Jar, and fetching data using a simple RestTemplate in the CafeService. The back-end is a Magnolia 6 project defining cafés as a Content Type, and serving it through the REST Delivery API.

This app was (re-)created for the JavaSaigon January 2019 meetup. An earlier version was originally featured at the JavaBasel 2016 conference (Headless Content Management on the Java stack).

Vaadin Flow notable differences

• UI class is different and is optional

• Servlet Definition is Optional (default one as servlet context listener registering routes)

• Completely new CSS4-based themes, no Sass

• Static resources are provided via web-fragments, no more VAADIN directory

• WebComponents are typically packaged as WebJars

See also:

• https://vaadin.com/docs/v10/flow/migration/3-general-differences.html

• https://vaadin.com/docs/v10/flow/migration/4-routing-navigation.html

• https://vaadin.com/docs/v12/flow/migration/6-theming.html

• https://vaadin.com/blog/vaadin-10-and-static-resources

• https://vaadin.com/blog/vaadin-10-and-webjars

Possible next steps/homework

• Use a lazy DataProvider to fetch cafés using the Delivery API pagination

• Replace the Grid with an IronList

• Implement global login/rerouting

• Port the Geolocation extension to calculate distances

• Add a form view to edit Cafés from the app

• Upgrade/bridge Jackrabbit’s Lucene to enable geo-search