Try out HTML5 drag-n-drop, components in Grid and TreeGrid today

Vaadin Framework 8.0 came out just a bit more than a month ago, but we are already pretty far with the next major feature enhancements. The top three new features in Vaadin 8.1 include (click links to see examples in Sampler):

Component support in Grid. In 8.1 it is no more required to use custom client side Renderers to customize the contents of a cell. This makes it much easier to customize your data grid. Renderers are still available for those who require the best possible client side performance.
TreeGrid, which replaces the old TreeTable component to display hierarchical data in tabular format.
New drag and drop API built around HTML5 drag and drop. Most components now support drag and drop, including Grid.

In addition to those, there is a bunch of other enhancements like improved OSGi & Liferay 7 support (not completed yet), LocalDateRender and LocalDateTimeRenderer for Grid, and the ability to define the row height in Grid programmatically (handy with components).

If you want to actively follow what is happening right now, see relevant milestones in GitHub.

Help us to test 8.1 today

We got a lot of good feedback when preparing 8.0 and we hope to get early feedback for 8.1 as well. Trying out the new features in 8.1 alpha releases is pretty easy, and older features can be considered stable. To try alpha releases, ensure you have the following repository in your pom.xml:

<repository>
   <id>vaadin-prereleases</id>
   <name>Vaadin Pre-releases</name>
   <url>https://maven.vaadin.com/vaadin-prereleases</url>
</repository>

Also add the same as <pluginRepository> if you use vaadin-maven-plugin to compile your custom theme or widgetset. The latest pre-release at the time of writing this is 8.1.0.alpha3, but you can check the latest version from the releases page. It also contains a command snippet to create an empty project with the latest pre-release in case you want to try it with an empty project.

The most important part of the testing is of course reporting your findings. Report all bugs, API enhancement ideas and thumbs up via any of the following channels:

Github
Gitter (our core engineers follow that for actively developed features)
Forum
Comment section below

Thanks in advance for your feedback!