Two months have passed since my last status update. That’s two months of last minute fixes, a late release, a well-deserved summer vacation and most recently attempting to resurrect the framework development mindset that was suppressed during the vacation.
The most awesome piece of news for you is not so new since Vaadin 7.1.0 was released almost a month ago. I won’t go into any details about 7.1.0 since that topic has already been covered quite thoroughly here. Vaadin 7.1.1 has also been released with fixes to various issues that we didn’t discover before 7.1.0 - as customary for anything following the x.y.1 version number pattern. The release is also noteworthy for having a record number of fixes made by developers outside the core development team. Many of these fixes come from an internal bug-squashing event where Vaadin Experts from other parts of the company spent an afternoon fixing bugs with the assistance of the core development team. External contributor Fabian Lange has also made several valuable fixes. Last on the release front is Vaadin 6.8.13 that has been postponed since there have not yet been any changes to the 6.8 branch since the last release.
With the past already covered, there is still some speculation about the future. We are of course continuously making fixes for upcoming maintenance versions based on your Bugfix Priorities as well as our own assessments. On top of that, we have also slowly started to work towards Vaadin 7.2. There are not yet any news on the big roadmap features like the new Table implementation or the new SASS-based theme since we will not start with those until the entire team has returned from summer vacation. Small enhancements and fixes are however slowly trickling in from many directions. Aside from tweaks to details deep in the framework, proper WAI-ARIA support has also been implemented for Tabsheet, Window and the notification mechanism.
One more thing: Vaadin is hosting the GWT.create conference in December. The conference will focus on GWT, related frameworks like Vaadin, Errai and GXT as well as general web platform topics. Not all the details have yet been set in stone, but I would expect at least part of the development team to be present in San Francisco as well as in Frankfurt am Main a couple of days later. This is a golden opportunity for anyone who would like to deliver thanks or insults to us in person. And while you are already there, you might even enjoy some of the presentations as well. :)
Those of you who don’t want to wait until December can of course also enter a comment below or express your opinions or concerns in the forum.