---
title: Getting Started With Vaadin Spring Without Spring Boot
order: 43
layout: page
---

[[i-b-getting-started-with-vaadin-spring-without-spring-boot]]
= I b - Getting started with Vaadin Spring without Spring Boot

Note: this tutorial applies to *Vaadin Spring 1.0.0 and later*

During this tutorial we will create a new Vaadin project, add Spring and
Vaadin Spring as dependencies, create a simple Spring UI and deploy the
application to a server. 

*Note that this tutorial is for using Vaadin Spring without Spring Boot.
Using Spring Boot is the recommended approach for getting started
quickly when creating a new project. For more information about setting
up a project both with and without Spring Boot -
see https://vaadin.github.io/spring-tutorial/[the Vaadin Spring Boot tutorial].*

[[creating-a-vaadin-project]]
Creating a Vaadin project
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you've created Vaadin projects before, there's nothing new here.
File→New→Project... then select Maven Project. This will take you to the
project creation wizard. You can also create the project using Vaadin
Plug-in for Eclipse if you prefer. 

image:img/project-creation.png[Project creation]

then select the Vaadin archetype
(`com.vaadin:vaadin-archetype-application:<newest Vaadin version>`).
Set your group and artefact ids and your package to your liking. (I used
`com.vaadin`, `spring.tutorial` and `com.vaadin.spring.tutorial` respectively)

[[adding-vaadin-spring-as-a-dependency]]
Adding Vaadin Spring as a dependency
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Open pom.xml and add

[source,xml]
....
<dependency>
    <groupId>com.vaadin</groupId>
    <artifactId>vaadin-spring</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.0</version>
</dependency>
....

in the dependencies. Also replace the dependency "vaadin-client" with
"vaadin-client-compiled" and remove the scope line for it as we are
using a pre-compiled widgetset. If your project does not use the Vaadin
add-on Maven repository yet, add it to the POM:

[source,xml]
....
<repositories>
    <repository>
        <id>vaadin-addons</id>
        <url>https://maven.vaadin.com/vaadin-addons</url>
    </repository>
</repositories>
....

Then save and update project.

[[creating-the-ui]]
Creating the UI
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The project wizard created a UI for us that we'll use as a starting
point for building our application. There are some unnecessary things
we'll take out and some things we'll need to add. Start of by deleting
the AppWidgetSet.gwt.xml, as we won't need a custom widgetset in these
tutorials. We'll also have to make a few changes to the UI to make it
work with Vaadin Spring.

Here's the UI's original source:

[source,java]
....
@Theme("mytheme")
@SuppressWarnings("serial")
public class MyVaadinUI extends UI {

  @WebServlet(value = "/*", asyncSupported = true)
  @VaadinServletConfiguration(productionMode = false, ui = MyVaadinUI.class, widgetset = "com.vaadin.spring.tutorial.AppWidgetSet")
  public static class Servlet extends VaadinServlet {
  }

  @Override
  protected void init(VaadinRequest request) {
    final VerticalLayout layout = new VerticalLayout();
    layout.setMargin(true);
    setContent(layout);

    Button button = new Button("Click Me");
    button.addClickListener(new Button.ClickListener() {
      public void buttonClick(ClickEvent event) {
        layout.addComponent(new Label("Thank you for clicking"));
      }
    });
    layout.addComponent(button);
  }
}

....

To allow Vaadin Spring to use the UI you'll need to add the following
annotation to the UI:

[source,java]
....
@SpringUI
....

The servlet configuration needs to be updated to initialize a Spring
application context, and the servlet should inherit from
`SpringVaadinServlet`. In this tutorial, a `ContextLoaderListener` is used
to initialize Spring.

Finally, as we do not need a custom theme in the application, the theme
annotation is updated to use "valo" and the custom theme in the project
can be deleted.

The resulting UI should be something like this:

[source,java]
....
package com.vaadin.spring.tutorial;

import javax.servlet.annotation.WebListener;
import javax.servlet.annotation.WebServlet;

import org.springframework.context.annotation.Configuration;
import org.springframework.web.context.ContextLoaderListener;

import com.vaadin.annotations.Theme;
import com.vaadin.server.VaadinRequest;
import com.vaadin.spring.annotation.EnableVaadin;
import com.vaadin.spring.annotation.SpringUI;
import com.vaadin.spring.server.SpringVaadinServlet;
import com.vaadin.ui.Button;
import com.vaadin.ui.Button.ClickEvent;
import com.vaadin.ui.Label;
import com.vaadin.ui.UI;
import com.vaadin.ui.VerticalLayout;

@Theme("valo")
@SpringUI
@SuppressWarnings("serial")
public class MyVaadinUI extends UI {

  @WebServlet(value = "/*", asyncSupported = true)
  public static class Servlet extends SpringVaadinServlet {
  }

  @WebListener
  public static class MyContextLoaderListener extends ContextLoaderListener {
  }

  @Configuration
  @EnableVaadin
  public static class MyConfiguration {
  }

  @Override
  protected void init(VaadinRequest request) {
    final VerticalLayout layout = new VerticalLayout();
    layout.setMargin(true);
    setContent(layout);

    Button button = new Button("Click Me");
    button.addClickListener(new Button.ClickListener() {
      public void buttonClick(ClickEvent event) {
        layout.addComponent(new Label("Thank you for clicking"));
      }
    });
    layout.addComponent(button);
  }
}
....

With the `@SpringUI` annotation the Vaadin Spring plugin will know to
inject the UI rather than directly instantiating it. With injected beans
we can use all of the usual Spring features such as autowiring. More on
that in later tutorials.

In addition to these changes, when not using Spring Boot, create the
following Spring context file at
src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml :

[source,xml]
....
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:context="http://www.springframework.org/schema/context"
  xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
      http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
      http://www.springframework.org/schema/context
      http://www.springframework.org/schema/context/spring-context-4.1.xsd">

  <bean class="com.vaadin.spring.tutorial.MyVaadinUI.MyConfiguration" />
  <context:component-scan base-package="com.vaadin.spring.tutorial" />
</beans>
....

A full description of alternative approaches to configuring Spring is
outside the context of this tutorial and you should consult Spring
documentation for them, but a brief introduction to them is given in
https://vaadin.github.io/spring-tutorial/[this
tutorial].

[[deployment]]
Deployment
~~~~~~~~~~

Once the UI is done we'll deploy it to our server by Run→Run as→Run on
Server. Select your server runtime (Tomcat in our case) and click
Finish.

Eclipse should automatically open an embedded browser directed at your
development server.

Congratulations! You've deployed your first Spring application.