The Vaadin Framework was not written overnight. After working with web user interfaces since the beginning of the Web, a group of developers got together in 2000 to form IT Mill. The team had a desire to develop a new programming paradigm that would support the creation of real user interfaces for real applications using a real programming language.

The library was originally called Millstone Library. The first version was used in a large production application that IT Mill designed and implemented for an international pharmaceutical company. IT Mill made the application already in the year 2001 and it is still in use. Since then, the company has produced dozens of large business applications with the library and it has proven its ability to solve hard problems easily.

The next generation of the library, IT Mill Toolkit Release 4, was released in 2006. It introduced an entirely new AJAX-based presentation engine. This allowed the development of AJAX applications without the need to worry about communications between the client and the server.