Vaadin – thinking of U and I

Version @version@ built on @builddate@.

Release Notes for Vaadin @version@

• Overview
• General Upgrade Notes
• Instructions for Upgrading from IT Mill Toolkit 5
• Package for the experimental GWT Out-of-Process Hosted Mode
• Important known problems in Vaadin @version@
• Change Log
• Requirements

This is a prerelease version of Vaadin 6.2, the Release Notes will change before the final release. Also notice that the regular Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse does not support Vaadin 6.2 yet; you should use http://vaadin.com/eclipse/experimental as the URL for the experimental plugin that supports the upcoming Vaadin 6.2.

Vaadin @version@ is an update for Vaadin 6. In addition to various fixes, it contains a number of significant enhancements.

• Widget set definition and component-to-widget mapping has been redesigned
• Reuse of widgets is now much easier, as it is easier to package and use widget set JARs and otherwise combine widget sets.
• A widget set definition class is no longer used. Java code needed for widget instantiation and client-server mapping is automatically generated by GWT compiler. For common Vaadin user, Widgetset is now only a GWT module definition file (.gwt.xml).
• Server-side component is mapped to a client-side widget with an annotation:

  @ClientWidget(com.vaadin.demo.colorpicker.gwt.client.ui.VColorPicker.class)
  public class ColorPicker extends AbstractField {

• The getTag() method is no longer needed
• The Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse can create new widget stubs, define the mapping, and create widget set definition files (.gwt.xml).
• See WebContent/docs/example-source/build-widgetset.xml for example on how you can compile widget sets and widget set JARs with Ant.
• A widget set builder allows automatic generation and maintenance of widget configurations, making use of widget set JARs easier.
• Other enhancements to development of new components
• On the server-side:
• Listeners are now easier to implement the ReflectTools and with addListener(String eventIdentifier, Class<?> eventType, Object target, Method method) methods that automatically inform the client-side that a listener is registered)
• On the client-side:
• Ability to check if a listener is registered on server side
• Typed arrays and maps can now be sent to server with updateVariable()
• Refactoring widget sets has also provided some optimizations for rendering
• Portlet 2.0 (JSR 268) support (no separate servlet, no session problems, portlet-to-portlet communication, etc)
• OSGi support
• Enhanced sorting of IndexedContainer and BeanItemContainer
• New layout in Sampler and several new examples
• JavaScript injection with Window.excecuteJavaScript(), "the method that you never want to use, but that is nice to have"
• Tree style generator, TabSheet close button, plus dozens of other small enhancements and bug fixes

Problem fixes and enhancements planned for upcoming releases can be found from the Vaadin Roadmap in Vaadin Trac.

As always, when upgrading from an earlier version, you should recompile any custom widget sets and refresh your project in Eclipse. If you are upgrading from earlier than 6.1.0, notice that Vaadin 6.1 uses GWT 1.7.0 (included in the installation package). See General Upgrade Notes for more details on upgrading.

General Upgrade Notes

When upgrading from an earlier version of the Vaadin library, you should always do the following:

1. Install the new Vaadin JAR to your project
• If using the Vaadin Plugin in Eclipse, download and select the new version in project preferences.
2. Install new GWT JARs if the GWT version has changed
• The Eclipse plugin will download the new GWT automatically when you update the Vaadin version; you will need to update GWT paths in the widget set compilation launch configurations in Eclipse (#3286).
3. If you have custom widget sets, recompile them with the new Vaadin library using the included GWT compiler
4. If using the Eclipse IDE:
   1. Refresh the Eclipse project by selecting the project folder and pressing F5
   2. Restart the application server

Using the Vaadin project facet in the Eclipse IDE does the steps 1 and 2 automatically.

Instructions for Upgrading from IT Mill Toolkit 5

While the Vaadin 6 API is otherwise mostly backward-compatible with IT Mill Toolkit 5.4, the change of the product name has made it necessary to reflect it in the Java package names, some name prefixes, and some other details.

Server-side Upgrade Instructions

• Java Package names have changed:
• In all Java files using IT Mill Toolkit, rename package prefix com.itmill.toolkit → com.vaadin
• You also need to update the web.xml deployment descriptor:
• The servlet class is now com.vaadin.terminal.gwt.server.ApplicationServlet.
• Changes in themes:
  • Rename WebContent/ITMILL → WebContent/VAADIN
  • If you have extracted the built-in themes and widgetsets in IT Mill Toolkit JAR to the folder to have them served statically by the server, remove the old content and re-extract from Vaadin JAR.
  • This may require changes to build scripts for custom widgetsets, as well as to any code that relies on the old naming (it is discouraged but possible).
  • The new "reindeer" theme is the default theme in Vaadin; the old "default" theme in IT Mill Toolkit 5 has been renamed as "runo"
  • There is no longer a theme with name "default"
  • In your custom theme, replace:

    	@import "../default/styles.css";
    →	@import "../reindeer/styles.css";	if you wish to use the new default theme,
    or →	@import "../runo/styles.css";	if you wish to use the old default theme.

  • Use the new default theme with setTheme("reindeer") and the old one with setTheme("runo").
  • CSS class names now start with "v-" prefix instead of "i-"
  • Search and replace ".i-" → ".v-" in custom themes
• Embedding Vaadin applications in web pages:
• The name of the JavaScript variable used for launching applications has changed from "itmill.toolkitConfigurations" → "vaadin.vaadinConfigurations"
• Other changes in naming:
• Rename references to translateToolkitUri() → translateVaadinUri() method in ApplicationConnection class.

Client-side Upgrade Instructions

The following changes are relevant only if you have developed or integrated custom client-side widgets with Google Web Toolkit (GWT).

• GWT 1.7 is required for compiling custom widgets (optional)
• You need to upgrade GWT
• The GWT Compiler class name has changed:
• Replace com.google.gwt.dev.GWTCompiler → com.google.gwt.dev.Compiler in your widget set build script (Ant) or launch configuration (Eclipse).
• Replace the output directory argument for the compiler with the new WAR output argument: -out → -war. The directory parameter for the argument remains unchanged.
• The "I" (IT Mill) prefix in client-side widget classes has been changed to "V" (Vaadin), for example: IButton → VButton.
• Rename IToolkitOverlay → VOverlay

Notes and Limitations for Google App Engine

The following instructions and limitations apply when you run a Vaadin application under the Google App Engine.

• Applications must use GAEApplicationServlet instead of ApplicationServlet in web.xml.

• Session support must be enabled in appengine-web.xml:

      <sessions-enabled>true</sessions-enabled>

• Avoid using the session for storage, usual App Engine limitations apply (no synchronization, i.e, unreliable).

• Vaadin uses memcache for mutex, the key is of the form _vmutex<sessionid>.

• The Vaadin WebApplicationContext 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>.

• DO NOT update application state when serving an ApplicationResource (e.g ClassResource.getStream()).

• AVOID (or be very careful when) updating application state in a TransactionListener - it is called even when the application is not locked and won't be serialized (e.g ApplicationResource), and changes can thus go missing (it should be safe to update things that can be safely discarded later - i.e valid only for the current request)

• The application remains locked during uploads - a progress bar is not possible

Package for the experimental GWT Out-of-Process Hosted Mode

We provide a separate (platform independent) installation package (vaadin-oophm-@version@.tar.gz) for the experimental Out of Process Hosted Mode (OOPHM) of GWT, which allows debugging client-side code in GWT Hosted Mode with a regular web browser. Using the OOPHM requires installing a browser plugin (available for Mozilla Firefox, IE, and WebKit). See the manual section on OOPHM for more details.

The Linux version of GWT Hosted Mode Browser is no longer compatible with Vaadin (#2299), so the OOPHM is the only option for debugging in hosted mode in Linux.

The GWT 1.7.0 version included in the OOPHM package is a custom build from GWT trunk and is not 100% compatible with the official GWT 1.7.0 release (#3270).

As the OOPHM package is experimental and because there are differences between the version packaged with Vaadin and the official version of GWT, you should use it only for debugging purposes during development. For production use, and generally when you absolutely do not need to debug using OOPHM, you should compile your custom widget sets with the regular Vaadin package for your platform.

Important known problems in Vaadin @version@

• #1155: Uncompressing the installation package fails in Windows if using the default Zip uncompression. Uncompression gives (in Windows Vista) an error message about too long filenames, and a more obscure message in other versions of Windows. Workaround: use 7-Zip or some other good unzip program for Windows.

• #2299: The Hosted Mode Browser does not work in Linux for debugging client-side GWT code. You need to install the experimental OOPHM package instead (see above) for development. For production, you should use the regular package for Linux.

• #3716: OOPHM Hosted Mode browser does not work in Firefox 3.0 with vaadin-oophm-6.x.x/gwt/plugins/firefox3/oophm-xpcom-ff3.xpi. As a workaround, the old oophm.xpi plugin provided in the IT Mill Toolkit 5.3.0 package works just fine with Vaadin OOPHM 6.1.4 and later.

For other known problems, see open tickets at developer site dev.vaadin.com.

Change Log

The following closed issues have been included in this release:

• #2719: Sampler margin demo shows wide right margin without explanation
• #2918: Same application is loaded in different portlet instances
• #3070: Tree's Items should be easily styled
• #3088: ComboBox, If only one item is listed, pressing Enter should choose it, not discard
• #3117: Portlet 2.0 (JSR-286) support
• #3234: Component Event Listener Framework for all widgets/components
• #3277: MenuBar.MenuItem could have setVisible() method
• #3323: Redesign sampler main screen
• #3386: Add JUnit tests for ensuring compatibility with all supported application servers and portals
• #3387: Google AppEngine integration test
• #3433: BeanItemContainer's sort is not overridable
• #3434: IndexedContainer's compare is not overridable
• #3499: PopupView CSS style is broken
• #3541: VerticalLayout//HorizontalLayout/GridLayout/AbsoluteLayout/CSSLayout should support click events
• #3544: Implement support for focus/blur events in TextField
• #3553: Change nightly and develpoment version numbering
• #3605: Patch to avoid concurrent modification exceptions in EventRouter
• #3640: Update build-widgetsets.xml and verify it works
• #3655: ApplicationRunner logs unnecessary java.lang.ClassNotFoundExceptions
• #3683: TextField.setRows() API needs reworking
• #3731: Implement a simpler alternative to ApplicationContext.TransactionListener
• #3740: Tabsheet no longer fully serializable, doesn't work in GAE
• #3754: Add data.util.TextFileProperty
• #3755: Select throws IllegalArgumentException when browsing pages quickly
• #3756: Add support for passing a typed Object[] from client to server
• #3757: Add support for passing a typed map from client to server
• #3759: Cannot scroll to the last tab in a Tabsheet
• #3760: Scrollbars are missing in Safari/Chrome
• #3762: Dependency to javax/portlet/PortletRequest, won't work with GAE
• #3772: Add notifier interfaces for focus and blur events
• #3775: Optimize Tree rendering
• #3776: Server side junit test cases should be run automatically on each build
• #3782: ClassCastException when adding Window via addComponent
• #3783: ClickListener in Panel does not work
• #3784: Panel.setScrollTop does not work with invalid values
• #3785: Style names for MenuBar.MenuItem
• #3786: Add focus and blur events to Select/VFilterSelect and DateField/VTextualDate
• #3788: Typo in setWriteThrough's parameter name

Requirements

Vaadin is available for the following operating systems:

• Windows (see the Zip installation notice above)
• Linux
• Mac OS X Tiger (mac) or Leopard (leopard)
• Other UNIX operating systems, such as Sun Solaris, using the installation package for Linux.

Vaadin supports Java Servlet API 2.3 and later versions and should work with any Java application server that conforms to the standard. It supports the following application servers:

• Apache Tomcat, version 4.1 or later
• BEA WebLogic® Server, version 9.2 or later
• IBM WebSphere® Application Server, version 6.1 or later
• JBoss Application Server, version 3.2.8 or later
• Jetty, version 5 or later
• Glassfish, version 2 or later

Vaadin supports the following browsers for using the applications made with it:

• Mozilla Firefox 3
• Internet Explorer releases 6, 7, and 8
• Safari 3 and 4
• Opera 9.6 and 10

The support for browsers follows the support by GWT. The browsers are supported on both Windows and Mac, if available. Firefox is supported also on Linux (Opera 10a1 works also on Linux though also suffers from #2652). There may be differences between the exact versions of the supported browsers that may cause incompatibility with applications made with Vaadin.

The following browsers are not supported but have been found to work to a large degree:

• Safari 2, and 4 beta
• Firefox 2
• Google Chrome 1.0.x (available only for Windows)
• iPhone (firmware 2.2)
• Midori (0.1.2)
• Epiphany (2.22.3), Galeon, and other Gecko-based browsers. Also WebKit-based Epiphany (2.22.3) works.
• Konqueror 4.2 (3.5.x does not work)
• Nokia Internet Tablet N800 and N810 (ITOS 2008, Opera-based browser).

The reported versions are those that have been tested, though other versions may work as well.

Nokia E-series phones, such as E90, have been known to work with older versions, but not with Vaadin 6. Links, Lynx, and other text-based browsers do not work.

Vaadin – thinking of U and I