Hilla Blog

Developer’s source of truth for Hilla development.

March 1, 2024Lawrence Lockhart

1-line sortable and filterable data grid for Spring Data

Presenting data in a clear, interactive, and visually appealing manner is a common activity of many web developers. Hilla's AutoGrid component gives developers a way to take backend data and efficiently display it on the frontend user interface. AutoGrid simplifies data representation and enhances…
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December 13, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Hilla 2.5: DTO support for CRUD components

We're happy to announce the 2.5 release of Hilla. This release addresses a common question we've heard from you when it comes to the new CRUD components: what if I don't use JPA? Hilla 2.5 adds support for DTOs, which means you can now use the CRUD components with any data source. More flexible data…
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November 21, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Hilla 2.4 simplifies form creation and CRUD operations

We're excited to introduce Hilla 2.4, featuring new components aimed at improving developer productivity in business web application development. This release includes AutoForm and AutoCrud, designed to streamline the creation of forms and CRUD views. AutoForm: Streamlining Form Management AutoForm…
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October 18, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Hilla 2.3 introduces streamlined grid creation and security helpers

Hilla 2.3 is out! This release includes a new AutoGrid component and authentication helpers for React. 🪄 AutoGrid: a fully-featured grid in one line of code AutoGrid allows you to configure a Grid component to automatically fetch data from the backend. It supports pagination, sorting, and filtering…
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October 17, 2023Lawrence Lockhart

App Development Simplified with Hilla Components

Intro In the area of application development, time and efficiency are of the essence. As developers, we are constantly on the lookout for tools that can streamline our workflow while enhancing the end user experience. This is the exact use case of Hilla, a robust framework that ties the best of Java…
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October 16, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Using Third-Party React Components in Hilla

Hilla supports using any third-party React component library in your apps. If you want to, you can use Material UI, React Bootstrap, Ant Design or any other React component library. In this tutorial, we'll use the React Colorful color picker as an example. Creating a Hilla App First, you'll need a…
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October 9, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Tutorial: Integrating React Query with Hilla for Type-Safe Backend Services

In this hands-on tutorial, we will delve into using React Query with Hilla to connect to Spring Boot through type-safe backend services. We will be creating a simple Hilla application that integrates React Query on the frontend. As we walk through the process, you'll gain an understanding of how to…
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October 5, 2023Leif Ă…strand

Why you don't need REST endpoint classes with Hilla

We are introducing some new terminology with Hilla 2.2. We have renamed the server-side logic that you call from the browser to "browser-callable services" instead of "endpoints." We have realized that the endpoint terminology leads us to think about the network communication layer in an overly…
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September 28, 2023Tarek Oraby

Spring Boot & React To-Do App

What You Will Build In this guide, we build a full-stack To-Do app with Spring Boot and React using the Hilla framework. You can find the complete source code for this tutorial in GitHub: https://github.com/tarekoraby/hilla-todo . What You Will Need 10 minutes Java 17 or newer Node 18.0 or newer…
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September 22, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Streamlined React Form Validation with Spring Boot using Hilla

Forms are an essential component in web applications, and their validation is crucial for a good user experience. If you've been looking for a streamlined approach to React form validation, you're in the right place. With the release of Hilla 2.2, you can now effortlessly build forms using the new…
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September 14, 2023Lawrence Lockhart

Bringing Spring Boot and React together with Hilla

Intro As a newly-minted Developer Advocate with Vaadin, I’m in the unique position of having fresh eyes to explore our frameworks, components and other services. For the last few days, I’ve been building with Hilla, a full-stack framework for building web applications, as I build a pet project in…
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September 12, 2023Marcus Hellberg

What's new in Hilla 2.2: React form hook and hot reloading

Grids and forms are the workhorses of business applications. While Hilla already has a powerful grid component , creating forms has been more challenging than we would have liked. Hilla 2.2 fixes this by introducing a new form hook for React. ✍️ New React form support Building a robust form can be…
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August 16, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Using microservices from Hilla

Hilla is a full-stack framework for building web applications with Spring Boot and React. It embraces the backends for frontends (BFF) pattern, where backend services are tailored for specific frontends. Hilla makes it easy to connect Java backends to TypeScript React frontends using type-safe…
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July 14, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Calling ChatGPT and OpenAI APIs in Spring Boot with Java

This article will guide you on integrating OpenAI APIs, such as ChatGPT, in your Spring Boot application. We will cover moderation, embedding, and chat completion requests. It is a part of our Building an AI chatbot in Java series . Prerequisites This tutorial assumes you already have a Spring Boot…
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July 14, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Building a ChatGPT-based AI bot using Spring Boot, React, and Hilla

In this article, we'll build a custom AI chatbot application using Hilla, Spring Boot, React, OpenAI (ChatGPT), and Pinecone. The chatbot is designed to answer Vaadin Flow and Hilla development questions using up-to-date documentation as reference material. My earlier blog post details the concept…
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July 14, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Deploying a Spring Boot app as a native GraalVM image with Docker

In this final part of the Building an AI chatbot in Java series , we will deploy the Spring Boot AI chatbot application we've built as a GraalVM native image. Requirements The instructions in the article assume you are working with the Hilla Spring Boot application we've built in the series, but…
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July 14, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Building and Deploying an AI Chatbot with Java: A Comprehensive Guide

A while back, I built the Vaadin Docs Assistant , a ChatGPT-based AI assistant that can answer technical questions about developing with Vaadin Flow or Hilla based on the latest available documentation. If you're curious about the concepts behind the assistant, I recommend my earlier blog post…
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July 14, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Integrating Pinecone Vector Database into a Spring Boot Application

Dive into the process of integrating the Pinecone Vector database with a Spring Boot application using Java in this second installment of the Building an AI chatbot in Java series . Prerequisites The article assumes you have a Spring Boot application. The example project is a Spring Boot…
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July 14, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Enhancing ChatGPT with Prompt Engineering and Token Counting in Java

This article is part three of the Building an AI chatbot in Java series , where we're building a custom AI chatbot application using Hilla, Spring Boot, React, OpenAI (ChatGPT), and Pinecone. The chatbot is designed to answer Vaadin Flow and Hilla development questions using up-to-date…
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May 9, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Setting up Tailwind CSS in a Hilla project

Hilla uses the Vaadin Lumo design system that comes with a set of simple of utility classes for common styling tasks. If you need more advanced functionality, like support for responsive layouts, you can easily switch to using the more comprehensive Tailwind CSS library. Here are the steps to…
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April 23, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Lazy Loading data grid in React tutorial

In this tutorial, we will implement a grid data provider to enable lazy loading in a React data grid using the Vaadin Grid component. Lazy loading helps us efficiently load large datasets by fetching only the required data as the user scrolls through the grid. This tutorial is based on Hilla 2.…
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February 14, 2023Marcus Hellberg

Your frequently asked Hilla questions answered

I had the pleasure of speaking about Hilla at four events in January: Boulder JUG, Denver JUG, Utah JUG, and a webinar hosted by Vaadin. It was a great opportunity to connect with developers in person and get their initial reactions to Hilla. The feedback developers shared was overwhelmingly…
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December 14, 2022Marcus Hellberg

Hilla 1.3: a faster way to build React + Spring Boot apps

It's time to build a new web application. You've decided to use React with a Java back end, so you're good to go right? Not quite. There's still a lot of work to do to set up a new project, configure your build tools, find good UI components, and create APIs for communication between your front…
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November 10, 2022Marcus Hellberg

Optimistic view updates for latency compensation

In this tutorial, you'll learn how to keep your web app feeling fast even when your backend or connection is slow, using a technique called optimistic updating or latency compensation. The basic idea is that you update the view before calling the server, optimistically assuming things will work out…
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September 13, 2022Marcus Hellberg

Develop a full-stack Java application with Kafka and Spring Boot

What You Will Build You will build a full-stack reactive web app that sends and receives messages through Kafka. The app uses Spring Boot and Java on the server, Lit and TypeScript on the client, and the Hilla framework for components and communication. What You Will Need 20 minutes Java 11 or newer…
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June 13, 2022Mikael Sukoinen

New release: Hilla 1.1

The first new Hilla minor release, version 1.1, is out now! We roll out updates to the Hilla framework with quarterly minor releases that both fix bugs and introduce new features. The previous version, Hilla 1.0.6, is being maintained for 3 more months – so update now! What's new? Hilla 1.1 ships…
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June 2, 2022Marcus Hellberg

Sending web push notifications from Spring Boot

Web push notifications are a way of informing your app users when something important has happened. Users can receive web push notifications even when they are not actively using your application, for instance, if the app is open in a background tab or even if it's not open. Push notifications are…
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May 12, 2022Artur Signell

Reactive endpoints: pushing data to the frontend

Despite being on the web where millions or billions of people move around every day, web applications always tend to start out as being single-user applications. Not in the sense that only one user can log in or one user can use the application at a time but, as a user of the application, you don’t…
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February 16, 2022Leif Ă…strand

Why we built Hilla

Does the world really need yet another frontend framework? We believe it does, because different frameworks have different underlying assumptions that lead to optimizing for different things. Let's take a look at the principles that have led us to build Hilla as a framework that integrates Spring…
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