Vaadin’s Better

Before putting all of this time into learning about how to use Vaadin, if your familiar with the alternatives, it might be useful for you to know how Vaadin is better, to know its advantages.

Better than Spring MVC and Thymeleaf, JSP or FreeMarker

Vaadin is an alternative to using Spring MVC and Thymeleaf, JSP or FreeMarker when building web applications with Spring Boot. Vaadin has many advantages over these alternatives. Here’s a list of the main advantages:

• Vaadin is designed for building interactive Single-Page Applications (SPAs). Spring MVC and templates are better suited for more static content.

• Vaadin offers a Java component API, allowing you to build the entire application in Java.

• Vaadin comes with a large library of customizable UI components.

• Vaadin handles the communication between the server and the browser automatically. You don’t need to write any JavaScript to update content dynamically.

Better than REST with React or Angular

Combining a Spring Boot-based REST backend with a frontend framework like React or Angular is a popular way of building SPAs. However, Vaadin allows you to build similar application experiences with less effort. The advantages of using Vaadin over these other methods are several:

• Faster development: you don’t need to develop the backend and frontend, separately.

• You can write the entire application in type-safe Java.

• Vaadin comes with a large library of customizable UI components.

• Vaadin handles the communications between the server and the browser, automatically. You don’t need to write any JavaScript to update content, dynamically.

• It’s more secure. The Vaadin application runs on the server and doesn’t expose application code or extra endpoints to the browser.

You can compare Vaadin, Angular, React, and Vue on the Framework Comparison page.