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Vaadin DEV team Update 9/2013

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Leif Åstrand
Leif Åstrand
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On Sep 26, 2013 8:35:00 AM
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There are lots of things going on right now, so please bear with me while I struggle with keeping all the things on a suitable level of detail.

The biggest change, literally implemented under the hood, is that we have reorganized the R&D department. For about two years, Vaadin Framework and all our other open source products have been developed and maintained by one monolithic development team, lead by our VP of R&D, Artur Signell. Growing the team with this structure also meant that Artur had to put more and more of his focus on the day-to-day matters of the team instead of thinking about all the important high level stuff.

We have now fixed this smell by refactoring ourselves into three independent teams with room to grow. As a consequence of this, I will have limited visibility into the private and protected matters of those teams. I will however do my best to also keep you informed about what those teams are up to. In the same move, the team that used to take care of our commercial products, e.g. TouchKit and TestBench, was also split up and incorporated into the R&D teams with the responsibilities for those products divided (and conquered) among the teams.

Our biggest undertaking this fall is the new data Grid that has been just beyond the horizon for almost a year already. The good news is that there is now an entire team dedicated to designing and implementing this major new feature for the rest of the year. The same team will also take care of various enhancements to the framework that might be needed to properly support the new functionality. Planning, design and prototyping are already well underway and the first 1 000 lines of actual implementation code are currently under review. The exact list of features we are aiming for is not yet fully determined and we know even less about what we will actually be able to deliver. For now, I will therefore just refer you to what is already published in the roadmap.

In the meantime, the other teams have finished TouchKit 4.0.0.alpha1 with a new theme and support for Windows Phone, while work towards TestBench 4.0 is well under way. We are also pushing to make push more reliable and the result of that work will hopefully be reflected in Vaadin 7.1.7 which is due in about two weeks. Another high impact fix targeted for that maintenance release is compatibility with the latest release candidate of Liferay 6.2.

One last thing I’m going to highlight out of the things brewing in the R&D pot is my participation in the Vaadin Application Security Webinar next Thursday. Together with Kim Leppänen from the Services team, we will discuss how Vaadin helps you secure your applications and where the framework can’t be of much help. If your involvement in the security of your application ends when the login form has been implemented, you might have a good opportunity of getting some new insights. And if you think you know everything about information security in general, there might still be some practicalities specific to Vaadin that you are not yet aware of.

Over and out.

Leif Åstrand
Leif Åstrand
Leif Åstrand keeps an eye on the overall architecture of the Vaadin platform. He knows a thing or two about how Vaadin, Web Components, and the internet works.
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