The author of the text attended JFokus and met Matti Tahvonen from Vaadin, who presented an open-source web framework for rich Internet applications in Java. The author was impressed by Vaadin's capabilities and decided to explore it further. They created a simple CRUD application using Vaadin and Spring Boot, which stores data in Couchbase. The application uses the `@Document` annotation to define the entity, and the `CouchbasePagingAndSortingRepository` interface to handle database operations. The author also used Viritin, a server-side enhancement library for Vaadin, to create a form that allows users to edit customer data. The form is connected to the backend using Vaadin's UI components, such as the `MTable` and `Button` classes. The application uses Spring Boot's auto-configuration features to simplify development. Overall, the author found the process of building the CRUD application with Vaadin and Spring Boot to be relatively easy and straightforward.