Multi Line Table Cells in Vaadin 6

I had a hard time figuring out how to wrap content in a table cell using Vaadin 6.7.
Content in row headers can be forced to wrap using a simple "<br/>" tag in the string. Unfortunately it isn't that simple with non-header cells.
I found a working solution in this Vaadin forum post.
You simply have to create your own CSS stylesheet definition and add the following code to it:

 .v-table-cell-wrapper {   
  white-space: normal;   
 }  

Moving default progress indicator and make it modal in Vaadin

The default progress indicator in Vaadin is displayed at the upper right corner of your web application. Sometimes this is not the best location, especially if you want your users not to miss this little image. So just place the progress indicator into the centre of the screen.
The progress indicator is by default not modal, so users can still interact with the web application. Maybe this is not what you want and you would like to make the progress indicator modal so users can't interact with the web application during a long running process.
To summarize the goals:

1. Move default progress indicator from upper right corner to centre
2. Make indicator modal, so users can't interact during a long running process

The easiest thing to accomplish this is to edit the styles.css file of your Vaadin theme. If you use the standard theme you may want to extend it by creating your own styles.css for your theme.
I use the reindeermods theme so the styles.css example provided below extends exactly that theme.
The minimal styles.css solution to solve the requirements:

 
 @CHARSET "ISO-8859-1";
 @import url(../reindeermods/styles.css);

 .v-loading-indicator,  
 .v-loading-indicator-delay,  
 .v-loading-indicator-wait {  
   width: 100%;  
   height: 100%;  
   margin: 0;  
   background-position: 50%;  
   background-color: gray;  
   background-repeat: no-repeat;  
   background-attachment: fixed;   
   opacity: .8;  
   -ms-filter: alpha(opacity=80);  
   filter: alpha(opacity=80);  
 }  

This solution was taken from this Vaadin forum post.

Adding Vaadin Add-Ons to your Maven managed application

One of the things I really like about Vaadin is the simplicity and the speed when developing the UI with Vaadin. Another great benefit of Vaadin is its Add-On directory where lots of useful add-ons are maintained and provided.

Add-Ons which implement client side UI must be recompiled by the GWT compiler to include them into your app.
To me it was not clear how to do that precisely despite the docs provided here and here.

I found this great blog article describing the necessary steps to use Add-ons with Maven. This is especially useful and described in detail for using Add-Ons which implement client side (JavaScript) code.

To minimize compile time I recommend to use a maven profile as described in the article. This prevents a GWT compilation of the widgetset each time the project is built.

In my case I used version 2.3.0 for GWT and for the gwt-maven-plugin.