We are getting closer to releasing our next minor release, 7.6. There has already been 7 alpha pre-releases and we hope to call them betas in the next couple of weeks. We encourage developers to use, or at least try, our pre-releases when working with projects without strict deadlines. This is an easy way to contribute to the Vaadin project by giving us some early feedback on new features, when we can still change, for example, the newly introduced APIs. And you can also enjoy all awesome new features earlier than your competitors ;-).
Recently, we changed the way how we publish our pre-releases. Earlier we just pushed everything to the Maven central repository, but now we use a separate repository, maven.vaadin.com/vaadin-prereleases, for unstable releases. After this change has been fully completed, autocompleting the version number of a dependency in your IDE should show a bit more relevant list, new projects you create with archetypes defaults to the latest stable release and, during development phase, your project can use special versions, like LATEST or RELEASE with Maven.
How to use a Vaadin pre-release
- Go to vaadin.com/releases/
- Select the latest pre-release from the right hand box. It’s the topmost link.
- In the same panel, further down, there is a box containing a repository definition - add this to your pom.xml (or similar entry to ivy.xml or build.gradle if you’re using IVY or Gradle.
- If you are using Maven, and also want to use the latest vaadin-maven-plugin, add a
entry with the same URL. - Update the Vaadin version number to the pre-release of your choice
- Try it and post your findings via dev.vaadin.com.
There is also a simple example project that uses Vaadin 7.6.0.alpha5 from the new pre-release repository.
Alternatively, if you are playing around with Vaadin pre-releases often, you can configure your global settings, or just some specific profile, to include the Vaadin pre-release repository. See Maven settings help page for more details on how to do this.