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The library was not written overnight. After working with web user interfaces since the beginning of the Web, a group of developers got together in 2000 to form IT Mill. The team had a desire to develop a new programming paradigm that would support the creation of real user interfaces for real applications using a real programming language. The library was originally called Millstone Library. The first version was used in a large production application that IT Mill designed and implemented for an international pharmaceutical company. IT Mill made the application already in the year 2001 and it is still in use. Since then, the company has produced dozens of large business applications with the library and it has proven its ability to solve hard problems easily. The next generation of the library, IT Mill Toolkit Release 4, was released in 2006. It introduced an entirely new AJAX-based presentation engine. This allowed the development of AJAX applications without the need to worry about communications between the client and the server. IT Mill Toolkit 5, released initially at the end of 2007, took a significant step further into AJAX. The client-side rendering of the user interface was completely rewritten using GWT, the Google Web Toolkit. IT Mill Toolkit 5 introduced many significant improvements both in the server-side API and in the functionality. Rewriting the Client-Side Engine with GWT allowed the use of Java both on the client and the server-side. The transition from JavaScript to GWT made the development and integration of custom components and customization of existing components much easier than before, and it also allows easy integration of existing GWT components. The adoption of GWT on the client-side did not, by itself, cause any changes in the server-side API, because GWT is a browser technology that is hidden well behind the API. Also themeing was completely revised in IT Mill Toolkit 5. The Release 5 was published under the Apache License 2, an unrestrictive open source license, to create faster expansion of the user base and make the formation of a developer community possible. Stabilization of the release 5 took over a year of work from the development team. It introduced a number of changes in the API, the client-side customization layer, and the themes. Many significant changes were done during the beta phase, until the stable version 5.3.0 was released in March 2009. IT Mill Toolkit was renamed as Vaadin in spring 2009 to avoid common confusions with the name (IT Mill is a company not the product) and to clarify the separation between the company and the open source project. Vaadin means a female semi-domesticated mountain reindeer in Finnish. The most notable enhancements in Vaadin 6 are the external development tools:
The Eclipse Plugin allows easy creation of Vaadin projects and custom client-side widgets. See Section 2.2.5, “Vaadin Plugin for Eclipse” for details. The visual editor, described in Chapter 7, Visual User Interface Design with Eclipse (experimental) makes prototyping easy and new users of Vaadin should find it especially useful for introducing oneself to Vaadin. Like Vaadin itself, the tools are open source. While the API in Vaadin 6 is essentially backward-compatible with IT Mill Toolkit 5.4, the package names and some name prefixes were changed to comply with the new product name:
Other enhancements in Vaadin 6 are listed in the Release Notes for Vaadin 6.0.0, which also gives detailed instructions for upgrading from IT Mill Toolkit 5. |
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