JavaBlackBelt evolves its UI

JavaBlackBelt evolves its UI

2009-07-24

We are currently deep in the process of rethinking what JavaBlackBelt is about and how it should work. We believe that by making it more useful, user-friendly and smarter, you, the community, will be better served and more engaged.

In the spirit of releasing early and often to get your feedback, features from this re-thought JavaBlackBelt - 4.0, for those keeping count - will be introduced regularly over the coming months.

The first, very modest, such feature is the new user profile page. Over time, it will become the central place to keep up with JavaBlackBelt activities of interest to you.

We've also decided to switch user interface technology. Out with Struts 2 and its page-driven model and JSP rendering, in with Vaadin and its component model and Swing/GWT-like API.

Vaadin is a UI framework sort of combines JSF and GWT. It actually uses GWT to render a thin client-side JavaScript application, but tracks the state of the UI on the server side.

Though the switch is a big one, the gains are worth it: working in Java all the way down to the client, but without having to worry about the limitations imposed when serializing objects to JavaScript.

We'll write more about this technical choice later.