Creating a Project with the NetBeans IDE

    Installation of NetBeans and the Vaadin plugin is covered in “Installing the NetBeans IDE and Plugin”.

    Without the plugin, you can most easily create a Vaadin project as a Maven project using a Vaadin archetype. You can also create a Vaadin project as a regular web application project, but it requires many manual steps to install all the Vaadin libraries, create the UI class, configure the servlet, create theme, and so on.

    1. Select File › Net Project…​ from the main menu or press Ctrl+Shift+N.

    2. In the New Project window that opens, select the Vaadin category and one of the Vaadin archetypes from the right.

      The archetypes are described in more detail in .

    Creating the project can take a while as Maven loads all the needed dependencies.

    The project wizard has done all the work for you: a UI class skeleton has been written to the src directory. The project hierarchy shown in the Project Explorer is shown in A new Vaadin project in NetBeans.

    netbeans created annotated hi

    A new Vaadin project in NetBeans

    The theme of the UI. See for information about themes.

    MyUI.java

    The UI class, which is the main entry-point of your application. See “Server-Side Applications” for information about the basic structure of Vaadin applications.

    The Vaadin libraries and other dependencies are managed by Maven. Notice that the libraries are not stored under the project folder, even though they are listed in the Java Resources › Libraries › Maven Dependencies virtual folder.

    Once created, you can run it in a server as follows.

    1. In Projects tab, select the project and click in the Run Project button in the tool bar (or press F6).

    2. In the Select deployment server window, select a server from the Server list. It should show either GlassFish or Apache Tomcat or both, depending on what you chose in NetBeans installation.

      Also, select Remember Permanently if you want to use the same server also in future while developing applications.

      Click OK.

    The widget set will be compiled at this point, which may take a while.

    If all goes well, NetBeans starts the server in port 8080 and, depending on your system configuration, launches the default browser to display the web application. If not, you can open it manually, for example, at . The project name is used by default as the context path of the application.