The official release of Vaadin MCP server is a reality.
What does it make different?

Yes I'm a fan of Vaadin. I've used it in a couple of projects and productivity was sky high. For those not initiated to the framework, Vaadin allows you to write Java code for the front-end and back-end; no Javascript required, which is an unlikely dream for full stack engineers that nevertheless turned to reality.

That Java solution was wrapped in the shape of the server-side option called Flow. However in an attempt to lure developers that work say with Angular, a frontend solution introduced as Fusion in Vaadin 15, and now called Hilla, allowed devs to do reactive UI logic in TypeScript while continuing writing the backend in Java. That attempt however was recently folded in merging Hilla into Flow per the official statement:

Going forward, the primary way of using Vaadin is with server-side Java for the UI. We see a Java-only approAach as the most productive way of building applications with a rich domain model and complex business logic that needs to be accurately represented in the UI without compromising security.

With the ink still wet from that announcement, there was yet another announcement but a more exciting one; the release of the Vaadin MCP server. Quite expecting since everybody is doing MCP these days. So what does that herald?

It addresses the issue of relying on stale documentation. As AI coding assistants are becoming part of everyday development, without MCP they rely on stale training data and guesswork, which can miss newer components hence suggest deprecated APIs.

The deal here is that before MCP, asking say Copilot would fetch answers from it's training set which could be outdated. Instead the MCP server now offers all the up to date documentation and enables real time retrieval and semantic search over it.

As such Vaadin's MCP server always fetches fresh information, be it component APIs, theming, or version details. Its main selling points are:

• Find answers fast: semantic search across the official Vaadin docs.
  
  
• Ground your assistant’s suggestions: fetch exact passages from the docs to cut down on hallucinations.
  
  
• Use the correct, current APIs: component version awareness and references to avoid deprecated patterns.
  
  
• Build idiomatic Vaadin apps: best-practice guidance for components, layouts, and data binding.
  
  
• Keep styling consistent: theming tokens and styling guidance pulled straight from the docs.
  
  
• Get up to speed quickly: a concise Vaadin primer with practical do’s and don’ts.

It's compatible with all the major coding assistants and pretty easy to set up. For instance for VSCode based Copilot just add to the configuration file .vscode/mcp.json the following:

{
"servers": {
   "vaadin": {
      "type": "http",
      "url": "https://mcp.vaadin.com/docs"
     }
  }
}

You can fire any question and get quality answers back. There's much more so check the official documentation to get started. The project is of course open source and available on Github for everyone to explore.

In the end with MCP we're moving away from the limitations imposed by the constrained knowledge of the dataset that the LLM was trained upon to getting at real time, up-to-date and directly from the source documentation.

More Information

MCP Server for Vaadin

On Github 

Related Articles

Vaadin 23.0.0 Released - Flow and Hilla 

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