Installing the Eclipse IDE and Plugin

    Using Eclipse IDE for Vaadin development requires installing the IDE itself and the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse. You are adviced to also configure a web server in Eclipse. You can then use the server for running the Vaadin applications that you create.

    Installation of the Eclipse IDE toolchain

    Vaadin Designer is a visual design tool for professional developers. It allows for easy creation of declarative designs. It is also good as a sketching tool, as well as an easy way to learn about Vaadin components and layouts.

    Once you have installed the Eclipse IDE and the plug-in, you can create a Vaadin application project as described in “Creating a Project in Eclipse”.

    1. Download the Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers from

    2. Decompress the Eclipse IDE package to a suitable directory. You are free to select any directory and to use any ZIP decompressor, but in this example we decompress the ZIP file by just double-clicking it and selecting “Extract all files” task from Windows compressed folder task. In our installation example, we use C:\dev as the target directory.

    Eclipse is now installed in C:\dev\eclipse. You can start it from there by double clicking eclipse.exe.

    We recommend that you install Eclipse manually in Linux and other UNIX variants. They may have it available from a package repository, but using such an installation may cause problems with installing plug-ins.

    You can install Eclipse as follows:

    1. Download Eclipse IDE for Java EE Developers from http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/

    2. Decompress the Eclipse package into a suitable base directory. It is important to make sure that there is no old Eclipse installation in the target directory. Installing a new version on top of an old one probably renders Eclipse unusable.

    3. Eclipse should normally be installed as a regular user, which makes installation of plug-ins easier. Eclipse also stores some user settings in the installation directory.

      To install the package, enter:

    1. If you wish to enable starting Eclipse from command-line, you need to add the Eclipse installation directory to your system or user PATH, or make a symbolic link or script to point to the executable.

    An alternative to the above procedure would be to use an Eclipse version available through the package management system of your operating system. It is, however, not recommended, because you will need write access to the Eclipse installation directory to install Eclipse plugins, and you may face incompatibility issues with Eclipse plugins installed by the package management of the operating system.

    You can install the plugin as follows:

    1. Select Help › Install New Software…​.

    2. Currently, if using the stable plugin, the Group items by category should be enabled. If using the experimental plugin, it should be disabled. This may change in future.

    3. Select all the Vaadin plugins in the tree.

      Then, click Next.

    4. Review the installation details and click Next.

    5. Accept or unaccept the license. Finally, click Finish.

    6. After the plugin is installed, Eclipse will ask to restart itself. Click Restart.

    More installation instructions for the Eclipse plugin can be found at .

    The notification center is a feature of the Vaadin Eclipse plug-in. It displays notifications about new Vaadin releases as well as news about upcoming events, such as webinars. The notification center can be connected to your Vaadin account.

    The plug-in adds an indicator in the bottom right corner. The indicator shows whether or not there are any pending notifications. The indicator turns red when there are new notifications.

    Clicking the tray icon opens up the pop-up, as shown in Overview of the notification center.

    notification center overview

    Overview of the notification center

    By clicking a notification in the list, you can open it up.

    Detailed view of a notification

    Clicking on the Clear All icon in the main pop-up clears all notifications and marks them all as read.

    The notification center uses your Vaadin account to determine which notifications you have acknowledged as read. If you want to keep the notification center in sync with your Vaadin account, you can sign in. If you have read a notification on the site, it will be marked as read in the notification center and vice versa.

    When you are not signed in, the top-most notification will be a notification that asks you to sign in.

    signin icon

    The sign-in notification

    When you click the sign-in item, a dialog opens for signing in.

    The sign-in dialog

    You can then sign in with your Vaadin account.

    First, click on the sign-in link. It opens a second dialog, as shown in .

    signin via website

    Sign-in authentication dialog

    By following the vaadin.com link and logging in to the Vaadin website using your preferred account, you can then copy the authentication token from the resulting page. After that, you can paste the authorization token into the dialog and click Submit to log in.

    You can open the settings by selecting Eclipse…​ › Preferences.

    The settings pane

    The options are as follows:

    Enable automatic widgetset compilation

    Compiles the widgetset of Maven-based projects whenever there are changes and the project is rebuilt.

    Enable Vaadin pre-release archetypes

    Adds pre-release (alpha/beta) archetypes to the archetype selection list when creating a new Vaadin project.

    Enable

    Disabling this disables all notifications.

    Show popups

    Disabling this stops pop-ups from appearing. The notifications can still be viewed by opening the notification center window.

    Check for new Vaadin versions

    Polls for new Vaadin versions once every 24h and gives a notification if there are new versions available.

    Check for new notifications from vaadin.com

    Polls the Vaadin site for notifications once every 4 hours.

    If you have automatic updates enabled in Eclipse (see Window › Preferences › Install/Update › Automatic Updates), the Vaadin plugin will be updated automatically along with other plugins. Otherwise, you can update the Vaadin plugin manually as follows:

    1. Select Help › Check for Updates. Eclipse will contact the update sites of the installed software.

    Notice that updating the Vaadin plugin only updates the plugin and not the Vaadin libraries, which are project specific. See below for instructions for updating the libraries.