Vaadin is pleasantly productive

I think Vaadin 6 is the first truly productive web UI framework I've worked with. Productive for me, anyway; experiences will vary depending on the task at hand and the developer.

I strongly recommend Vaadin 6 for anyone doing web applications - highly stateful tools where user counts are relatively low and UI complexity is relatively high.

The only real caveats I have to that recommendation are that:

• JPAContainer is very inefficient - largely due to an API design problem in Vaadin's Container API that makes it very hard to use the entity manager efficiently. Alas, this design flaw hasn't been remedied for Vaadin 7, so it's sometimes best to avoid JPAContainer and drive a Vaadin table from the outside instead.
• JPAContainer doesn't play well with Hibernate and lazily loaded entities. A workaround is provided, but it's clearly more used with EclipseLink. This won't be a problem if you drive your tables with your own data model code.
• Vaadin's stateful design means that each client costs you a non-trivial amount of memory on the server. If you want to serve large numbers of users who're doing simpler things you might want to consider a stateless JAX-RS API driven by client-side JavaScript and a lightweight templating engine, or look into one of the stateless server-side frameworks.

Vaadin 6 feels a little bit old at times, and you can certainly see its Java 1.4 history in more frequent use of casts rather than generics. It also requires an extension to integrate it with CDI - even then, only with pseudo-scopes.

Vaadin isn't beautiful, but damn, it works. Works well, and reliably. It's been at least two weeks since I found a bug in the tools I've been using, and that has never happened to me since I started using the Java EE stack!

Despite its flaws, JPAContainer is also impressively powerful. I really hope an enhanced Container API can be introduced to Vaadin 7 so it can reach its potential as a truly awesome RAD tool.

PostgreSQL usability - PgAdmin-III and Pg need some usability love

As anyone who's read much here will know, I'm a huge fan of PostgreSQL, the powerful open source relational database management system. It is an amazingly project with a team that keeps on releasing high quality updates full of very useful new features and improvements.

This is my blog, so there must be a "but", right? You're quite right.

I already wrote a PostgreSQL: Great even when you can see the warts in response to a perhaps overly glowing write-up someone did a while ago. I'm not covering that again here; this post is specifically about a topic more and more dear to my heart, that of usability.

As a long-time UNIX geek I've always found PostgreSQL quite easy to use, because I live on the command line where psql is just wonderful. Recently, though, I had to use PostgreSQL on Windows, and in the process couldn't help seeing it from the new user's point of view. In fact, I tried to think like a new user as I performed the tasks I needed to do.

It wasn't all roses. I knew enough about Pg to get past the issues pretty easily, but some of them would be real roadblocks for new or even intermediate users, and I think they're worth highlighting. Many of the issues were with PgAdmin-III, but far from all of them.

This post started out as a minor critique of a few usability sore points in Pg and PgAdmin-III. As I went through step-by-step producing screenshots and thinking through the process as a user, though, I realised it's an absolute, complete and utter train-wreck. If this had been my first experience with PostgreSQL, I'd be a MySQL, MS-SQL or Oracle user now.