I believe many of Pro Account subscribers are wondering what’s the plan to improve our current Pro Add-ons. This blog post shares our Pro Add-ons roadmap and provides some insight how we are planning to manage our Pro Add-ons in future.
Current Pro Add-ons roadmap
Below picture shows release plan for our existing Pro Add-ons.
- JPContainer
- TestBench
- TouchKit
- Calendar
- Timeline
Some amendments to existing add-on release dates may occur when new Add-ons are included in Pro Account.
Although picture usually tells more than thousand words, I will elaborate it a little bit.
Our main focus in Pro Account team is now with JPAContainer, TestBench and TouchKit add-ons. We released TouchKit 2.0.0 major release in beginning of October and our next major releases will be JPAContainer 2.0.0 and TestBench 3.0.0.
Timeline and Calendar add-ons are not going to have major updates in future, although some new features will be introduced to these components when their maintenance releases are done. Maintenance releases will include enhancements entered into Vaadin Trac Ticket system. Minor add-on releases will only contain bug fixes and ill not be adding any new features to add-on.
Vaadin Ltd. add-ons:
As a Pro Account subscriber you are entitled to use bugfix priority with other add-ons released and certified by Vaadin Ltd too. These add-ons are:
- Vaadin PlugIn for Eclipse
- Vaadin Control Panel for Liferay
- Vaadin Chameleon Theme
- Vaadin TreeTable
- Vaadin ColorPicker
- Vaadin SQLContainer
Using above add-ons does not require Pro Account subscription, but you can use Pro Account Bugfix Priority and CustomBuild services to swiftly get custom builds, containing bug fixes that are slowing down your development.
In other words, you can safely include these components to your commercial projects and you can count on our prioritized support.
Next major Pro Add-on release: JPAContainer 2.0.0
Pro Account feature voting has influenced our decision to select JPAContainer as our next major Pro Add-on that we’re going to release. Adding JPA2.0 support to our JPAContainer has received quite a few feature votes so we decided to prioritize this add-on in our roadmap.
JPAContainer 2.0.0 will include following main features:
- JPA2.0 support (JSR 317)
- Improved performance
- Optimized database queries
- Simplified API:
- JPAContainerFactory class
- Filtering using Criteria API
- Compatibility with most popular ORM providers
- EclipseLink 2.0.0 (and newer)
- Hibernate 3.5.0 (and newer)
JPAContainer 2.0 will also work together with 'Vaadin Bean Validation' Add-on)
- Entity validation using Bean Validation API (JSR 303)
In case you are interested to evaluate our beta release please contact me. Also in case you have some features in mind that should be in 2.0.0 release please let us know. If it doesn’t get in 2.0.0 there is always 2.1.0 version.
JPAContainer 2.0.0 release candidate will be released 6th December. Final release is expected to be out by end of this year.
Future of Pro Add-ons - focusing on our customer needs
Our only goal for Pro Add-on development is to produce add-ons that are valuable to our customers and therefore we would like to get our active subscribers to express what they need and influence on what our Pro Account team should be focusing on next. Part of this effort, understanding our customer needs, is customer survey that will be sent out shortly to Pro Account subscribers.
Because JPAContainer development is already well under way we have made the decision to start next working on new version of TestBench. It’s features will be finalized soon after JPAContainer 2.0.0 release candidate. So, there’s still month or so to suggest features that you would like to see in next TestBench version. After that we want to get influenced by our existing Pro Account customers and focus on Pro Add-ons that benefits our subscribers, whether it is TouchKit 3.0.0 or something completely new.
We are constantly evaluating new add-ons that would help Pro Account subscribers during Vaadin application development lifecycle. Current assumption is that first addition to existing add-on portfolio would happen 1Q2012.