In 2020, we embarked on developing modern collaborative functionalities for your Vaadin applications, tackling the challenges of managing UI state changes and synchronization and ensuring every update efficiently reaches the appropriate users.
Our journey has been a learning curve—enhanced by user feedback, we've refined our APIs, improved our naming conventions, invested in comprehensive documentation, and connected features to relevant use cases. A surprising insight was the complexity involved in effectively communicating the foundational concepts of the Collaboration Kit.
Despite the progress we've made, reaching our original goals remains a distant milestone. It seems we may have been slightly ahead of the curve in adopting collaborative technologies. While many users expressed enthusiasm for these new features, there was hesitation in fully committing, especially when it came to financial investment.
To encourage broader adoption, we’re making the Collaboration Kit free and open-source with the Vaadin platform 24.5 release. This change goes beyond our previous free-for-development model by removing all restrictions on user numbers in production environments once it launches.
Modern business apps should be collaborative
In line with our commitment to enhancing collaboration within business applications, as highlighted in our Vaadin 24.4 release webinar, we are doubling down on this focus. We're not only making the existing Collaboration Kit complimentary but are also exploring new and enhanced collaborative features for both Flow and Hilla users to benefit equally. Watch the 24.4 community Town Hall below.
What this means for you now
With Vaadin 24.5’s Collaboration Kit, you can enhance user collaboration in real-time with the following features:
- Watch who is present or active in a view through customizable avatars, all in real-time.
- Experience immediate synchronization of field values and see which fields other users are editing, preventing data conflicts for users editing the same forms.
- Engage in real-time chats or use the comments section for both synchronous and asynchronous communication among users.
Included in this update is a suite of ready-to-use collaborative components designed to deliver a productive collaborative experience straight out of the box:
You can further tailor your experience by utilizing our Collaboration Managers, which include Presence, Message, and Form Managers. For a hands-on look at the possibilities, check out our Collaboration Kit Sampler.
For developers seeking deeper control and customization, our Topic API is an invaluable tool, enabling you to monitor updates, share topics among multiple users, and facilitate subscriptions to specific topics for updates on changes.
Dive into our documentation to get started, and stay tuned for upcoming innovations as we integrate full-stack signals into our Collaboration Kit. This will enhance functionality and adaptability, providing more dynamic, scalable, and secure collaborative environments.