Installing

Installing

The Vaadin Plugin for the Eclipse IDE includes wizards for creating new Vaadin-based projects. During development, it triggers the compilation of frontend resources. It also gives notifications about new Vaadin blog posts, and so forth.

You can also choose to install Vaadin Designer, a commercial 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”.

The plugin also allows creating and compiling Vaadin 8 and 7 projects. For those features, please refer to Vaadin 8 documentation.

More installation instructions regarding the Eclipse plugin can be found at vaadin.com/eclipse.

Installing the Plugin

You can install the plugin either from the Eclipse Marketplace or by adding the plugins site.

Installing from the Eclipse Marketplace

Install the plugin from the Eclipse Marketplace as follows:

Select **Help › Eclipse Marketplace**.
Enter Vaadin in the Find field and press Enter.
Click Install
In the Confirm Selected Features step, you can choose to install Designer for Vaadin 10+ and for Framework 7. Click Confirm to confirm the selection and install the selected plugins.
In the Review Licenses step, either accept the license or cancel installation.

Select I accept the terms of the license agreement and click Finish.
Accept to restart Eclipse by clicking Restart Now.

Installing from the Plugin Site

Add the Vaadin plugin update site by clicking Add… button.

Enter a name such as “Vaadin Update Site” and the URL of the update site: https://vaadin.com/eclipse. If you want or need to use the latest unstable plugin, which is usually more compatible with development and beta releases of Vaadin Framework, you can use https://vaadin.com/eclipse/experimental and give it a distinctive name such as “Vaadin Experimental Site”. Then click OK. The Vaadin site should now appear in the Available Software window.
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.
Select all the Vaadin plugins in the tree.

Then, click Next.
Review the installation details and click Next.
Accept or unaccept the license. Finally, click Finish.
After the plugin is installed, Eclipse will ask to restart itself. Click Restart.

More installation instructions for the Eclipse plugin can be found at https://vaadin.com/eclipse.

Notification Center

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.

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.

Signing in

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.

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.

If you do not have one, you can sign in using a Google, Facebook, or Twitter account instead.

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

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.

Notification Settings

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 Vaadin 8 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 8 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.

Updating the Plugins

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:

Select Help › Check for Updates. Eclipse will contact the update sites of the installed software.
After the updates are installed, Eclipse will ask to restart itself. Click Restart.

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.

Updated 2021-03-09 Edit this article

Eclipse Plugin