The Vaadin Add-on¶

The Vaadin add-on provides the Vaadin libraries and some minimal supporting functionality:

• The ContextClassLoader (source, javadoc) utility helps loading your Vaadin application class from the right context.
• An extensibility utility. The ExtensionComponentsUtil (source, javadoc) help you to split a Vaadin web application across modules.

More details on the ContextClassLoader¶

In non-modular application environments like the typical Java Web Application Server, you will typically use a build tool like ANT or Maven to package all libraries and resources that are required to run your Web application into one Web application archive (WAR). At runtime, a Web container like Apache Tomcat serves all code-like resources of the Web app from one classloading scope.

Toolkits like Vaadin that need to load user classes by name now need to decide what class loader to refer to for loading of user-defined classes, such as the actual application class in the Vaadin case. The right and de-facto standard choice is to use the context class loader associated with the current thread. Unfortunately Vaadin uses the class loader that loaded the Vaadin classes however.

In modular environments, such as Z2 but also OSGi, the Vaadin implementation will typically be shared among many Web applications. In that case, the application may see the Vaadin types but not vice versa.

In order to make Vaadin work as expected, add the following init parameter to the Vaadin servlet config in the web.xml file of your Web app:

<init-param>
    <param-name>ClassLoader</param-name>
    <param-value>com.my.package.ContextClassLoader</param-value>
</init-param>

Read on here:

• web.xml of Vaadin sample app
• Ticket with Vaadin
• A blog article on class loader topics

More details on the ExtensionComponentsUtil¶

While the context class loader from above is a necessity to use Vaadin, the extension components util (ECU) is a great but not strictly required addition. It implements the following formula

(Vaadin is all Java) + (Z2 for modular Java applications) => Modular Vaadin user interfaces on Z2

More specifically, when applications get bigger, user interface implementations, like other parts of your implementation, have a tendency to become too big to maintain as single, monolithic modules. Using the ECU you can rather easily break your user interface implementation into modules that may have their completely private set of dependencies. This does not only allow to split the code base into well-managable pieces, it does also allow to cleanly separate concerns and to implement general user interface extensibility.

Doing it¶

The extension component, that will be retrieved by the to-be-extended Vaadin UI must declare the extension point it belongs to and some priority, e.g. like this:

com.zfabrik.vaadin.extension.point=com.acme.sample.admin.mainTab
com.zfabrik.vaadin.extension.order=100

The extension point id used to find it (see below), the order is used to sort extensions. The latter can be useful, for example, to define the order of tab panels in a tab layout.

Now the component defined, after lookup, must implement the interface IExtensionComponentFactory (source, javadoc). This is so that a new component instance can be bound to a consuming Vaadin application. Also, it allows Z2 to bind the using application's life cycle to the extension component, so that an invalidation of the extension component also stops the using application.

One convenient way of implementing IExtensionComponentFactory is to declare a component of type com.vaadin.ui.Component with a custom *component.className".

On the consuming side, retrieving extension components for an extension point is as easy as running

// retrieve all Vaadin components for extension point "com.acme.sample.admin.mainTab" 
for (Component c : ExtensionComponentsUtil.getComponentyByExtensionForApplication(application,"com.acme.sample.admin.mainTab")) {
   // and add them to this.
   addComponent(c);
}