Earlier this year, our vision was to get you a beta release of Vaadin 7.2 by the end of this year. We have, however, come to realize that one critical feature (i.e. Grid) has posed more of a challenge than what we expected. This has postponed the plans for some of the smaller changes that we wish to include in the release.
While progress with Grid has been quite slow, we do believe that we have now sorted out the most challenging details. The result of all this work is that we now have a solid foundation that will (hopefully) allow us to (quite) easily add all the planned end-user features. To celebrate this milestone, we have started publishing snapshot builds from the Grid branch in addition to our normal nightly builds. Aside from all the nitty-gritty low-level details of DOM manipulation and data transport, the latest builds also support frozen columns, touch scrolling and multiple rows of headers and footers.
Things are looking even brighter for the fully parameterized SASS theme that is the other headline feature of Vaadin 7.2. The project is currently being developed as a separate project on GitHub and will be included in the core framework code repository once it has stabilized. If you are impatient to try it out, please note that you’d currently need to use the official SASS compiler since the version included with Vaadin is still missing some features that the new theme uses. Rest assured that Vaadin’s SASS compiler will be up to the task before the new theme is released.
Work has also continued on the upcoming new versions of TouchKit and TestBench, although there are no revolutionary news to report right now. We are still heading towards the planned 4.0 releases for each of the products before the end of the year.
On the maintenance side, we finally released Vaadin 7.1.8 with lots of improvements to push reliability, some tweaks to the SASS compiler and plenty of other fixes. Vaadin 7.1.9 with another batch of fixes is also about to be released quite soon.
This is most likely my last update for this year since I will be heading for the GWT.create conference in San Francisco and Frankfurt in the middle of December, after which it’s time for the holiday season and some welcomed days off. While waiting for my next update in January, you can of course ask us anything e.g. by writing a comment below, by heading to our discussion forum or by spotting either me or Artur in person at GWT.create.