Five year maintenance guarantee
Five years is a long time in a fast changing technology environment. We believe that you appreciate that the support is guaranteed for the foundation of your applications, which should work for years to come.
Vaadin has one of the most rigorous maintenance guarantees in the industry: we maintain each major release for at least five years from its initial release, in addition to maintaining two newest major product versions. And we have a track record of 11 years to show that this is not just empty promises.
Not only does this support cover Vaadin Framework, but all our official Vaadin products. And now that GWT is included in the framework as well, we are able to provide this guarantee to GWT developers as well by maintaining GWT within the Vaadin Framework.
What does this maintenance mean exactly? It means that any team that has signed up with Vaadin Gold or Platinum Support can mark any bug in our bug tracking system as a priority and our R&D team will put it to the front of the queue, fix it ASAP and release the fix as a maintenance release.
Supporting Vaadin 6
Vaadin Framework 6 was released on May 29, 2009. This means that the guaranteed five year support period for Vaadin 6 ends on May 29, 2014. Because we are maintaining two most recent versions, Vaadin 6 is maintained until Vaadin 8 comes out. That way all Vaadin Gold and Platinum Support customers can get any bug in Vaadin 6 fixed without any additional cost.
So even after five years, Vaadin 6 does not magically stop working in June. That said, strongly recommend that you should start planning migration to Vaadin 7. This will guarantee you support until 2018 and access to all the new features.
Migrating to Vaadin 7
While Vaadin 7 is a huge leap forward, modernizing the whole framework, migration from Vaadin 6 can be fairly simple if you so choose. Of course you might be tempted to also start using all the new features brought to you by Vaadin 7.
If you need advice or cannot set aside the time for doing the migration, the Vaadin team is happy to step up and help you through the migration to Vaadin 7 hands on. Give us a call to discuss about the migration options.
Joonas Lehtinen is the CEO and co-founder of Vaadin. He has been working with web app development tools and technologies for over 15 years and speaks frequently in Java conferences around the world. Joonas lives is San Jose, CA, with his wife and 5 year old son. You can follow him on Twitter – @joonaslehtinen