Greetings from the Vaadin Framework team. While there hasn’t been too many updates aside from release announcements, I think every now and then it is good to let everyone know where we are and what we are doing.
In Vaadin 7.4 we introduced the declarative format and released one of the most important components in the whole framework - the Grid. But there is more.
Vaadin 7.5 is getting quite close to feature freeze which means that beta 1 should be expected within a couple of weeks and a final release about one month after that. While the team has mainly been focusing on bugfixes and the upcoming Vaadin Spring add-on, there are also some new features in progress.
For Grid, we are adding column reordering using drag and drop, column hiding through a context menu and expandable row details. On top of this, we are also finalizing declarative syntax support to be fully compatible with the upcoming Designer 1.0, as well as adding some other minor enhancements. We were also considering drag and drop column resizing in Grid for this release, but scheduling constraints forced us to postpone it to 7.6 instead.
Beyond 7.5, we have already started considering what to focus on in Vaadin 7.6, scheduled for October. Right now it seems like the main focus will be on an armada of small productivity enhancements for you developers. While we already have collected a good list of suggestions from you, it is not too late to comment right here what you need - which parts of the framework cause most friction for your application development?
Btw, if you completely missed the Grid update, you can get a quick overview from the recent webinar we had: