In today’s development environment, there is an abundance of frameworks that we can choose from for front-end or user interface (UI) work.

I was recently talking with a friend about UI development. He has also been a programmer since programming was considered an arcane art (when those of us that did it were considered like Gandalf the Grey facing the Balrog). Or maybe we just saw ourselves that way. Regardless, both of us have been Java programmers for a great deal of that time.

We both lamented the fact that it was a context switch to go from coding most of our projects in Java, then needing to switch to JavaScript for the front end.

Based on conversations I’ve seen online, several readers are warming up their keyboards to chide me for complaining about having to code in JavaScript. Keep your keys cool, both of us and our co-workers are experienced in, and happy to write in, JavaScript and any of its frameworks for our clients. But using JavaScript isn’t always the best approach.

 In this post, we introduce two frameworks that allow you to code your user interface in Java: GWT & Vaadin…