  I review work on diffractive vector meson production in photon-proton
collisions at high energy and large momentum transfer, accompanied by proton
dissociation and a large rapidity gap. This process provides a test of the high
energy scattering dynamics, but is also sensitive to the details of the
treatment of the vector meson vertex.
  The emphasis is on the description of the process by a solution of the
non-forward BFKL equation, i.e. the equation describing the evolution of
scattering amplitudes in the high-energy limit of QCD. The formation of the
vector meson and the non-perturbative modeling needed is also briefly
discussed.
