Version @version@ built on @builddate@.
Release Notes for Vaadin Framework @version@
- Overview of Vaadin @version@ Release
- Complete change log for Vaadin @version@
- Enhancements in Vaadin @version-minor@
- Limitations in @version-minor@
- Vaadin Installation
- Package Contents
- Migrating from Vaadin 6 to Vaadin 7
- Vaadin @version@ dependencies
- Upgrading to Vaadin @version-minor@
- Supported technologies
- Vaadin on the Web
Overview of Vaadin @version@ Release
Vaadin @version@ is a maintenance release that includes a number of important bug fixes, as listed in the change log below. You can also view the list of the closed issues at the Vaadin developer's site.
For a list of enhancements in the last feature release, see Enhancements in Vaadin @version-minor@ and the Release Notes for Vaadin @version-minor@.0.
ChangeLog
This release includes the following closed issues:
-
@release-notes-tickets@
The full list of the closed issues can also be found at dev.vaadin.com.
Enhancements in Vaadin @version-minor@
The @version-minor@ includes many major and minor enhancements and changes first introduced in Vaadin @version-minor@.0. Below is a list of the most notable changes:
- UI replaces Application as the main entry point
- Heartbeat to reliably detect closed UI
- Supports multiple browser tabs by default
- Browser and request details available in UI init
- Direct access to request and session in UI init
- Access detected browser details in UI init
- Default UI class chosen based on a servlet parameter
- Custom UIProvider allows providing different UIs based on request parameters
- UI is by default reinitialized when the page is reloaded
- Redesigned layouts
- Minimal or no layout calculations to maximize layout speed
- Full control of layouts with CSS including borders and margins
- Redesigned lighter DOM for vertical, horizontal and css layout
- Client-side ComputedStyle API available
- Split to seven jars to allow deploying only what you need
- Adding multiple components with varargs in addComponents and appropriate constructors
- Support for mixing multiple themes on the same page
- RPC for communication between the server and the browser
- Static typing allows compile time checking
- Supports Java's primitive and boxed types, String, enums, arrays, List, Set, Map and Java beans
- Supports references to external or self served resources and references to other components
- Call from browser to server can be delayed to piggyback on the next XHR, optionally folding similar calls to only send the last value
- Calls to disabled or invisible components are ignored for security reasons
- Server-client shared state
- Java objects can be shared between client and server for easy component development
- State is automatically mirrored from server to client
- Support both public fields and bean properties
- Supports the same types as with RPC
- Only parts of the state that are modified are sent over the wire
- Allow calculating state on the fly just before state is sent to client
- Client-side can listen to shared state changes to simplify connectors
- State class can be annotated to automatically delegate state changes to corresponding properties in widgets
- Google Web Toolkit included
- A full copy of GWT is included in Vaadin Framework
- Vaadin team maintains a branch of GWT to include bug fixes and new features independent of official GWT release schedules
- All functionality of GWT is included to enable writing of client side UI:s, stateless applications, offline functionality and custom widgets
- Included Elemental library gives direct access to all cutting edge browser features
- Both browser plug-in based dev mode debugging as well as super dev mode are supported
- No more need to call requestRepaint() in components
- High level view navigation
- Support for URI fragment based view management
- Support for registering both pre-initialized view instances as well as view classes
- Programmatic navigation with navigateTo()
- Supports saving bookmarks to views
- Supports parameterized views
- Views can block navigation
- Connectors
- Connectors provide a flexible communication channel between client and server
- Separating communication code from widgets promotes reusability
- An explicit Connector hierarchy is maintained
- Mapping between server-side and client-side defined in client-side code to avoid server-side classpath issues
- JavaScript Connectors
- Implement connector logic using JavaScript instead of Java for easier integration with JavaScript libraries
- Wrap around any existing JavaScript based widget to adapt it for use in Vaadin
- No widgetset compilation needed
- Support for shared state and RPC as well as JSON-based communication based on simple JavaScript functions
- ColorPicker component
- Easy to use interface with clickable color gradients
- RGB, HSV and swatches color modes
- Color history
- Color preview
- CSS color code representation and handling
- Add listeners without method overloads
- Write addClickListener() instead of generic addListener()
- Supports code completion in IDE:s better
- Enables using Java 8 Lambda
- Renewed Vaadin Maven Plugin including features from GWT Maven Plugin
- New Maven architype eases creation of Vaadin 7 applications
- Renewed Eclipse Plugin adding Apache Ivy based dependency management
- Page bootstrapping renewed
- Simpler inclusion of Vaadin UIs to custom web pages
- Add-ons and applications can dynamically modify bootstrap page HTML
- VaadinSession
- Full control over session lifecycle
- Abstract away from servlets and portlets
- VaadinService
- Easily access deployment information and HTTP requests
- Abstract away from servlets and portlets
- Component extension API
- Allow adding functionality and customizations to any component
- Modify DOM and hook event listeners
- JavaScript callbacks
- Declare client-side JavaScript API from server
- Eases integration with parts of the page not controlled with Vaadin
- Relative paths used for all requests
- More flexible deployment
- Adds support for Apache ProxyPass and other similar proxies
- HTML5
- Vaadin 7 uses HTML5 doctype
- Use any parts of HTML5 in your application
- Page
- Abstraction for one browser window
- Run JavaScript
- Listen to page resizes
- Control navigation
- Loading custom JavaScript
- Annotate server-side classes with @JavaScript to request loading of JavaScript files
- Automated control of loading order and ensuring that files are loaded only once
- API cleanup
- API deprecated in Vaadin 6 or before removed
- Use enums instead of integer constants
- Embedded split up to different components for different purposes
- Image for showing images
- BrowserFrame for embedding web pages with iframes
- Flash for embedding Flash content
- Embedded now only intended for embedding using <object>
- Support for Firefox 17 extended support release in addition to latest stable Firefox release
- Sass Compiler
- Allows modularization of themes for better reuse and easier maintenance
- Support the most important features of SCSS
- Pure Java implementation without Ruby dependency
- Supports all of CSS
- On the fly conversion of SCSS to CSS during development
- Built in themes are now based on Sass
- Can be used in client-side projects as well
- @StyleSheet for automatic injection of css files
- ConnectorResource replaces ApplicationResource to reduce memory consumption
- Hierarchical error handling
- Open popups and start downloads in a way not stopped by popup blockers
- ThreadLocal access to VaadinService, VaadinRequest, VaadinResponse, VaadinSession and the current UI instance
- Component id replaces debug ids to allow wider use possibilities for identifying corresponding widget elements in DOM
- Range retrieval for indexed containers to enable optimize performance
- Native support for percent sizes to let the browser do the percent to pixel calculation speeds up rendering
- Custom class loader
- Allow specifying custom class loaders to better support Java EE, CDI and Spring
- Supports both servlets and portlets
- Updated data model
- Property getValue() uses generics to return the expected type
- Two phase commit support for commit/rollback
- BeanItem supports nested properties to allow flattening complex datatypes
- Bean Validation - Annotate beans with JSR-303 standard annotations to automatically create validators for the fields
- Field group
- Allow data binding of multiple fields together to item data source
- Supports buffering
- Supports two phase commit
- Annotation based and field name based property mapping
- Explicit data model converters
- All fields support explicit conversion from presentation format to data source format
- Conversions are bidirectional
- Allow defining a default converter for a specific type and override for specific fields
- Converters can be set per Table column to customize column formatting
- Built-in default converters
- automated conversions beween String, Boolean, Long, Date, Double, Float, Integer and Number
- Built in converters support internationalization
- Custom field component for building new fields as composition of existing components
- Simplified validation API
- No need to implement isValid() in validators any more
- Unsupported browser detection with customizable information page
- Vaadin 6 compatibility layer to ease migration from Vaadin 6
- Explicit layouts for Window and Panel
- Window and Panel components now require setting layout explicitly
- Distinction between Window or Panel and it's layout
- Layout manager
- Allows building custom layout calculations for widgets when browser based layouts are not powerful enough
- Optimizes number of reflows by batching layout calculations from multiple widgets together
There are many other enhancements. Most of them are described in more detail in the mini-tutorials in the Vaadin Wiki. Also see the Vaadin 6 to 7 Migration Guide. See also the Release Notes for Vaadin @version-minor@.0.
Limitations
- It is currently not possible to specify font-size as em or %, or layout component sizes with em (#10634)
Vaadin Installation
Vaadin is a Java framework for building modern web applications that look great, perform well and make you and your users happy. Vaadin is available under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (see the license.html in the Vaadin ZIP or JAR package).
The easiest ways to install Vaadin are:
- If using Maven, define it as a dependency or use any of the available archetypes (only vaadin-application is available for Vaadin 7 at the time of this release) to create a new project
- If using Eclipse, use the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse, which automatically downloads the Vaadin libraries
It is also available as a ZIP package downloadable from Vaadin Download page.
Package Contents
Inside the ZIP installation package you will find:
- Separate server-side (vaadin-server) and client-side (vaadin-client, vaadin-client-compiler) development libraries
- Precompiled widget set (vaadin-client-compiled) for server-side development
- Shared library (vaadin-shared) for both server- and client-side libraries
- Built-in themes (vaadin-themes) and the theme compiler (vaadin-theme-compiler)
- Dependency libraries provided under the lib/ folder
See the README.TXT in the installation package for detailed information about the package contents. Book of Vaadin (for Vaadin 7) gives more detailed instructions.
For server-side development, copy the vaadin-server, vaadin-client-compiled, vaadin-shared, vaadin-theme-compiler, and vaadin-themes from the main folder and the dependencies from the lib folder to the WEB-INF/lib folder of your Vaadin project. (The vaadin-client-compiled is necessary if you do not wish to compile the widget set by your own, which you need to do if you use almost any add-on components.)
For pure client-side development, you only need the vaadin-client and vaadin-client-compiler JARs, which should be put to a non-deployed project library folder, such as lib. You also need them if you compile the widget set for any reason, such as using Vaadin add-ons, or create new server-side components integrated with client-side widgets.
Migrating from Vaadin 6
All Vaadin 6 applications need some changes when migrating to Vaadin 7. The most obvious changes are in the application/window API and require extending either UI or UI.LegacyApplication instead of Application. A detailed list of migration changes are given in the Vaadin 7 Migration Guide.
Any custom client-side widgets need to be ported to use the new client-server communication API, or the Vaadin 6 compatibility API.
Vaadin 6 add-ons (ones that contain widgets) do not work in Vaadin 7 - please check the add-ons in Vaadin Directory for Vaadin 7 support.
Vaadin @version@ Dependencies
When using Maven, Ivy, Gradle, or other dependency management system, all Vaadin dependencies are downloaded automatically. This is also the case when using the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse.
The Vaadin ZIP installation package includes the dependencies in the lib subfolder. These need to be copied to the WEB-INF/lib folder of the web application that uses Vaadin.
The dependencies are listed in the Licensing description. Some are explicit dependencies packaged and distributed as separate JARs, while some are included inside other libraries.
Bean Validation
If you use the bean validation feature in Vaadin 7, you need a Bean Validation API implementation. You need to install the implementation JAR in the WEB-INF/lib directory of the web application that uses validation.
Upgrading to Vaadin @version-minor@
Upgrading the Eclipse Plugin
Vaadin 7 requires that you use a compatible version of the Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse. The stable version of the plugin is available from the http://vaadin.com/eclipse update site. Please see the section about updating the plugin in the Book of Vaadin and the installation instructions at the download site for more details.
You can also use the experimental Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse. Its update site is http://vaadin.com/eclipse/experimental.
General Upgrading Instructions
When upgrading from an earlier Vaadin version, you must:
- Recompile your classes using the new Vaadin version. Binary compatibility is only guaranteed for maintenance releases of Vaadin.
- Recompile any add-ons you have created using the new Vaadin
- Unless using the precompiled widget set, recompile your widget set using the new Vaadin version
Remember also to refresh the project in your IDE to ensure that the new version of everything is in use.
By using the "?debug" URL parameter, you can verify that the version of the servlet, the theme, and the widget set all match.
Eclipse users should always check if there is a new version of the Eclipse Plug-in available. The Eclipse Plug-in can be used to update the Vaadin version in the project (Project properties » Vaadin).
Maven users should update the Vaadin dependency version in the pom.xml unless it is defined as LATEST . You must also ensure that the GWT dependency uses the correct version and recompile your project and your widget set.
Liferay and other portal users must install the Vaadin libraries in
Notes and Limitations for Google App Engine
The following instructions and limitations apply when you run a Vaadin application under the Google App Engine.
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Applications must use GAEVaadinServlet instead of VaadinServlet in web.xml.
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Session support must be enabled in appengine-web.xml:
<sessions-enabled>true</sessions-enabled>
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Avoid using the session for storage, usual App Engine limitations apply (no synchronization, that is, unreliable).
-
Vaadin uses memcache for mutex, the key is of the form _vmutex<sessionid>.
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The Vaadin VaadinSession class is serialized separately into memcache and datastore; the memcache key is _vac<sessionid> and the datastore entity kind is _vac with identifiers of the type _vac<sessionid>.
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DO NOT update application state when serving an ConnectorResource (such as ClassResource.getStream()).
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The application remains locked during uploads - a progress bar is not possible
For other known problems, see open tickets at developer site dev.vaadin.com.
Supported Technologies
Vaadin 7 is compatible with Java 6. Vaadin 7 is especially supported on the following operating systems:
- Windows
- Linux
- Mac OS X
Vaadin 7 requires Java Servlet API 2.4 but also supports later versions and should work with any Java application server that conforms to the standard. The following application servers are supported:
- Apache Tomcat, version 5.0 or newer
- Oracle WebLogic® Server, version 10.3 or newer
- IBM WebSphere® Application Server, version 7 or newer
- JBoss Application Server, 4.0.0 or newer
- Jetty, version 5.0 or newer
- Glassfish, version 2.0 or newer
Vaadin 7 supports the JSR-286 Portlet specification. All portals that implement either of the portlet specifications should work. The following portals are supported:
- Liferay Portal 5.2 or newer
- GateIn Portal 3.1 or newer
- eXo Platform 3 or newer
Vaadin also supports Google App Engine.
Vaadin supports the following desktop browsers:
- Mozilla Firefox 18-19
- Mozilla Firefox 17 ESR
- Internet Explorer 8-10
- Safari 6
- Opera 12
- Google Chrome 23-25
Additionally, Vaadin supports the built-in browsers in the following mobile operating systems:
- iOS 5, 6
- Android 2.3, 3, 4
Vaadin SQL Container supports the following databases:
- HSQLDB
- MySQL
- MSSQL
- Oracle
- PostgreSQL
Vaadin on the Web
- vaadin.com - The developer portal containing everything you need to know about Vaadin
- vaadin.com/demo - A collection of demos for Vaadin
- vaadin.com/learn - Getting started with Vaadin
- vaadin.com/forum - Forums for Vaadin related discussions
- vaadin.com/book - Book of Vaadin - everything you need to know about Vaadin
- vaadin.com/api - Online javadocs
- vaadin.com/directory - Add-ons for Vaadin
- vaadin.com/pro-account - Commercial support and tools for Vaadin development
- vaadin.com/services - Expert services for Vaadin
- vaadin.com/company - Information about the company behind Vaadin
- dev.vaadin.com - Bug tracker
- How to get the source code of Vaadin