Overview

User Interface Component Class Hierarchy

The layout of the various components in a window is controlled, logically, by layout components, just like in conventional Java UI toolkits for desktop applications. In addition, with the CustomLayout component, you can write a custom layout as an HTML template that includes the locations of any contained components. Looking at the inheritance diagram, we can see that layout components inherit the AbstractComponentContainer and the Layout interface. Layout components are described in detail in “Managing Layout”.

Looking at it from the perspective of an object hierarchy, we would have a Window object, which contains a hierachy of layout components, which again contain other layout components, field components, and other visible components.

In addition to the built-in components, many components are available as add-ons, either from the Vaadin Directory or from independent sources. Both commercial and free components exist. The installation of add-ons is described in .