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What happened to Vaadin Elements?

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Marcus Hellberg
Marcus Hellberg
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On Mar 23, 2018 7:00:00 AM
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One of the changes introduced with the Vaadin 10 beta release is that there is no longer a separate product called Vaadin Elements. We now call them Vaadin components. You can find them at vaadin.com/components.

Backstory: why there were Elements in the first place

The development of our set of Web Components started parallel with Vaadin Framework. Vaadin Framework already had a set of components, so we felt that it would be confusing to our users also to call the new set components. It would have meant that we had two different kinds of Vaadin components that are incompatible with each other.

We started building the new component set from scratch but wanted it to be useful for developing complete applications right from the start. To accomplish this, we designed the components as a seamless extension to the Polymer Paper Elements set. The name Vaadin Elements was chosen to support this.

A simpler path forward

With the introduction of Vaadin 10, we have now been able to simplify things so that the same set of UI components can be used both standalone as Web Components and with a Java API using Vaadin Flow. At the same time, Flow introduced a new Element API for working with DOM Elements, potentially leading to confusion for developers searching for documentation. So, to simplify things, we decided to refer to our UI components as components.

"Component" is arguably the most commonly used term for describing UI building blocks, both for people coming from previous Vaadin versions and other frontend frameworks. With Web Components gaining more popularity in the broader web development community, we hope this will make them easier to find for new developers. It will also make it easier to find the right documentation as there are no longer different things with the same name in our platform.

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Marcus Hellberg
Marcus Hellberg
Marcus is the VP of Developer Relations at Vaadin. His daily work includes everything from writing blogs and tech demos to attending events and giving presentations on all things Vaadin and web-related. You can reach out to him on Twitter @marcushellberg.
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