How Vaadin (IT Mill) compares to Echo3
Sat, 05/30/2009 - 02:36 — mmcgovern
Finally after 4+ years the company I work for is ready to look at new frameworks. I've been following Echo for years but I need to evaluate some alternatives.
Does anyone have a fair comparison of Echo 3 and Vaadin? or any of the other "pure Java" web frameworks.
Vaadin vs Echo3
As a disclamer - I am the CEO of IT Mill, company behind Vaadin. I hope that it is ok to discuss about competing framework here.
I think that in principle IT Mill Toolkit 4 and Echo 2 were really similar solutions. Both frameworks had a problem - while development in server-side is easy, adding new components to client-side was painful as the client-side JavaScript implementations were complex for third parties to learn. Also the client-side models were more like one-way rendering - not a network of widgets with their own logic and state. As a result, development teams behind the frameworks ended up rewriting the client-side.
For IT Mill Toolkit 5 and now Vaadin 6, the client-side is based on Google Web Toolkit. Our aim was to make adding new widgets as easy as possible: they can be written in Java and client-side API:s are well thought out and documented (by Google). As a side benefit, we can use all the results of the cross-browser compilation and optimization research Google has done and will be doing in the future. Also - any GWT widget can be used in Vaadin just by adding one extra method.
Echo3 selected the other road (that we also considered) - they created a new JavaScript-based framework of their own that is used for building the client-side. I can not comment on pro:s and cons of this approach as I have not tried to program with the Echo3 JavaScript framework.
I hope that this post does not count as promoting or spam. It it does, we can discuss about the differences openly on Vaadin forums.