I am happy to announce that the new Vaadin 7 edition of the book just came out of print. The book is thicker than ever, perfect for bashing others over technical Vaadin details, and the color of the cover is this time...drumroll...red. We will again be giving away copies for free at events which we attend to, so please come meet us and get yours.
Marko Grönroos is a technical writer working at Vaadin, and the author of Book of Vaadin.
The web edition, as well as the PDF and ePub editions, are of course always there for you with the most up-to-date content. Most of the book examples are available live.
So, what’s new in the book? Since the Vaadin 6 edition, the introductory Part I and the Chapter 4 on server-side application development have been completely revised to talk about UIs, Pages, VaadinServlets, VaadinSessions, and so forth. A part of the installation chapter has changed, mostly because of the adoption of Ivy in Eclipse projects. There is a new section about basics of application architectures with Vaadin. Note also the new section about navigation using the new Navigator in the advanced topics chapter, although that will probably be moved to the Chapter 4 in the next edition, as it is such a basic topic after all.
With basic components, few have changed significantly. The Embedded component was split into Image, Flash, and BrowserFrame, and CustomField was included. The deprecated Form is no longer included in the book, but there is a new section about using the FieldGroup to create forms. Note also the use of property converters in Vaadin 7. An intro about Sass themes is now included. Popup windows, embedding, request handlers, printing, JavaScript API, and so on and so on.
One of the biggest changes in Vaadin 7 was the complete overhaul of the client-server communication and the API, which now uses shared states, RPC, and connectors, so we now have an entirely new Part III about client-side development, where the integration chapter has been completely rewritten. The part also includes more general information about GWT development, as GWT is included in Vaadin 7. The support for client-side development has been evolving quickly and the part will receive plenty of further revision in the future.
The Part IV about add-ons has received a new chapter about the Vaadin Charts, which is our new high-end charting component based on HighCharts. The Vaadin Timeline is now included in Charts, although still documented in a separate chapter. Also the chapter on TouchKit was revised for the new Vaadin 7 style API in TouchKit.
As often is the case, Vaadin has developed much too fast to keep the book completely up-to-date with it. Some important chapters and sections will be updated more thoroughly later.
One interesting topic in the future is the translation of the book into different languages. Vaadin has large user communities in many non-English-speaking countries. We had an experimental translation project of Book of Vaadin 6. We got especially many Spanish translations of the first chapters of the book, as well as many Czech and French. We will, at some point, look how to transition the project to the Vaadin 7 book.
You can pick up a free copy of the book at Devoxx UK, Devoxx FRA, Vaadin Meetups, and at some other events in Spring 2013. Please see our event calendar.