Maven plugins

You must have used, or at least seen, the Vaadin Maven plugin. It allows you to compile the widget set and theme, among other tasks. When creating a new Vaadin application, though, you don’t have any add-ons, custom client-side components, or themes. This means you don’t need the Vaadin Maven plugin just yet. You can use the default widget set provided by the vaadin-client-compiled dependency.

We can benefit from at least one Maven plugin at this point: the Jetty Maven plugin. Although you can configure most IDEs to use a variety of servers in order to deploy your application during development, the Jetty Maven plugin frees you from further specific configurations, making it simple for developers to choose the tools they prefer. To use the plugin, add the following to the pom.xml file:

<build>
    <plugins>
        <plugin>
            <groupId>org.eclipse.jetty</groupId>
            <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>9.3.7.v20160115</version>
        </plugin>
    </plugins>
</build>

With this in place, you can run the application by creating a new running configuration in your IDE to execute mvn jetty:run. Point your browser to http://localhost:8080 and you should see the application running: