As announced in Joonas Lehtinen’s product keynote at Vaadin Create, with Vaadin 24.6, we’ve taken a step back from introducing new features to focus on something equally important: refining the foundation. This “Snow Reindeer” release is dedicated to enhancing stability, boosting performance, and improving the overall experience for developers and users alike.
If this sounds familiar, it’s a philosophy famously embraced by Apple with their Snow Leopard release. Much like Apple’s decision to prioritize performance and efficiency over new features, Vaadin 24.6 is about delivering a platform that developers can rely on to build business applications for the future.
Let’s dive into what’s new and noteworthy in this release.
What’s new in Vaadin Flow?
Custom drag images for drag-and-drop
Sponsored by a customer, Vaadin 24.6 introduces custom drag images for drag-and-drop. Initially excluded due to inconsistent browser support, this functionality is now supported across all modern browsers, enabling developers to create polished and intuitive drag-and-drop experiences.
Web Push Notifications
Web Push Notifications have graduated from preview to become an official feature. With improved API consistency and support for custom notification properties, this enhancement ensures compatibility with modern browser updates, including iOS, which added support just last year. This upgrade is the result of a mix of community feedback and strategic investment.
Improved JRebel integration
JRebel now re-renders only the affected parts of the Vaadin UI instead of performing a full-page reload. This enhancement ensures rapid iterations, which are essential for Vaadin Copilot to deliver a smooth and efficient development experience.
Simplified Spring Servlet customization
Customizing the Spring Servlet used by Vaadin is now easier than ever. This improvement streamlines development workflows and was also sponsored by a customer. Documentation is available to guide developers through this process.
What’s new in Hilla?
We’re continuously evolving Hilla’s full-stack signals support, which remains behind a preview flag for now. This release introduces several new features:
ListSignalfor managing lists of data.- API for waiting on operation results.
- A new operation validator to enforce access control rules, ensuring a secure and flexible architecture.
Additionally, Hilla now uses a unified ObjectMapper across the stack, providing consistency for handling types like dates and times.
Flexible filesystem router configuration
The filesystem (FS) router gains more flexibility, allowing developers to render views without wrapping them in a layout. This update is part of the ongoing strategic investment that began in Vaadin 24.4, bringing us closer to finalizing this enhancement and adding a new layer of customization to your Vaadin applications.
Community-driven improvements in Hilla
Community feedback has led to additional improvements in Hilla:
- Updates to Flux subscriptions now notify changes in the connection state.
- Translation files can now be instantly updated in views, improving i18n workflows. This update is part of ongoing internationalization efforts and continues to improve the developer experience.
Vaadin Copilot: Improved developer tools and experience
Vaadin Copilot has received several updates in 24.6 to improve usability and productivity for developers:
- Redesigned toolbar: The Copilot toolbar now offers additional features like alignment, padding, and gap adjustments. This makes it easier to make visual changes to elements directly in context, streamlining UI customization workflows.
- Copy and paste support for Flow components: Developers can now copy and paste most Flow components, significantly speeding up UI development and improving efficiency.
- Enhanced UI Services Panel: The updated UI Services Panel now displays information about return types and generic parameters, providing better insights for debugging and development. This enhancement applies specifically to Hilla's
@BrowserCallableservices, ensuring clarity for developers working with client-server communication.
- Vaadin IntelliJ plugin enhancements: The IntelliJ plugin now displays all Flow endpoints in a single view, making it easier to navigate and manage Flow views across your project.
- Multimodule project support: Copilot now supports projects composed of multiple modules—a common structure for enterprise applications. This update makes Copilot more versatile and simplifies workflows for larger, more complex projects.
These updates continue to make Vaadin Copilot a robust tool for improving the full-stack Java development experience.
Design System: New features and enhancements
The Vaadin Design System continues to evolve with new components and features that simplify and enhance UI development:
- Dashboard component: The highlight of this release, the new Dashboard component, makes it easier to create visual dashboards for your applications. See documentation
- Grid conditional selection: A handy improvement that allows you to enable or disable row selection in the Grid component based on custom conditions.
See documentation - DatePicker server-side parsing: The DatePicker now supports server-side parsing, allowing you to handle custom date formats directly on the server for Flow applications. See documentation
- Manual validation: A new feature enables developers to override the automatic validation in input fields. Learn more on GitHub.
These updates enhance flexibility, improve usability, and make the Vaadin Design System even more powerful for building high-quality business applications.
Control Center: Simplified, automated installation
Feedback from early users highlighted that the installation process for the Vaadin Control Center needed to be more straightforward. With Vaadin 24.6, we’ve simplified it, enabling installation with a single Helm command. This feature is still in preview, and we are continuing to refine it to make the process even simpler.
Looking ahead
A big thank you to our customers for sponsoring features and to our community for their invaluable contributions—together, you help make Vaadin better for everyone! Interested in shaping future releases? Find out how you can get involved.
Update to Vaadin 24.6 today and share your feedback. For a complete list of improvements and changes, check out the release notes.
Got questions? Contact our experts or join the discussion on the Vaadin Forum.