For more than 25 years, Vaadin has been about one thing: making Java developers more productive while delivering outstanding user experiences.
Throughout this journey, we’ve evolved our client-side implementation from custom HTML renderers and AJAX to GWT and Web Components, all while keeping our Java APIs and programming model consistent. That focus on developer experience has always been at the heart of what we do.
A few years ago, we introduced Hilla, a stand-alone approach to building reactive web UIs with Java and TypeScript. It gave developers a new way to build apps with a fully typed end-to-end experience. An alternative approach to the 100% Java approach. Over time, we’ve learned a lot from the community’s feedback on both Hilla and Vaadin Flow.
Today, we’re ready for the next step: Hilla will be merged into Vaadin Flow and our main focus lies on building web UIs in pure Java.
Technically, this merge will take time, and we don’t plan for any breaking changes in Vaadin 25.
But by discontinuing Hilla as a stand-alone product we will add more priority and focus to building the Java framework, make it more lightweight, add better APIs to the components, better support for Quarkus, Jakarta EE and Spring and much more that people building apps in Java expect and need. This will also free time and focus for putting more effort into other Java ecosystem compatibilities.
The current Hilla way will stay as the way to build offline and client-side implementations in Vaadin framework applications in the future as well. But the main way of building UIs for the web will be in pure Java.
Same core idea, but with better focus
Developer Experience (DX) and User Experience (UX) are the core of what we do. These as well as the open source Apache 2.0 model will not change. As a result of this however you can expect more components, more productivity and the same support you’ve come to love in the past decades. Modernizing your existing Java app or building a completely new one will be even easier in the next 25 years.
What would you like to see in the framework next? Please comment below!