The first half of the year is coming to an end once again. During this first half most of our effort went into the plug-in for Spring Roo and the visual editor but now they are out there for you to use, freely as always. Sadly this was at the cost of Vaadin 7 planning and development, which still remains in its early stages. It is, however, looking brighter and brighter for the next major version and we will work hard on it during the rest of the year.
Right now we are working on a tutorial on how you can use our recently released tools together to even more efficiently create Vaadin applications. This will be included in the next revision of Book of Vaadin.
Next we will be finalizing the second version of Vaadin TouchKit, which is what you will want to use to create the mobile version of your Vaadin application. The new version will include more components and support for more mobile devices (iPad, Android). You will hear more about this before summer.
A new version of JPAContainer is planned for the fall, supporting JPA 2.0 and more. If you have strong opinions on what features in JPAContainer would make your life much easier, now would be a good time to write a forum post about it. I can't promise to answer all posts but I will read them.
For Vaadin 7 we are hoping to have the first developer preview version out in the end of 2011Q3. This will include improvements in how you create navigation in Vaadin applications, automate the fragment handling and more.
We will also be making a lot of smaller improvements to Vaadin itself and our add-ons. We are planning for a Vaadin 6.7 release later this year which will incorporate the most popular of our free add-ons (SQLContainer, TreeTable and Chameleon Theme) and also, as usual, contain a lot of other small improvements.
As always, check out http://vaadin.com/roadmap for real time information on what is being done.