Reworked themes and Sass support
Sass support has been improved a lot in this version and makes it possible to do advanced theming in a simple way. You can use it to combine themes, import one component from some theme and the rest from another, remove all styles from a component and start theming from scratch (or from the base theme) and much more. This all in addition to the basic features of Sass such as variables and mixins. To support all this, the Base and Reindeer themes have been restructured for beta4. Chameleon and Runo will follow.
For more (technical) information, see the
mini tutorials
.
OSGi support
OSGi support has been improved and all modules in Vaadin 7 beta 4 now define exports and imports/requirements for OSGi environments.
Proxy server support
URL handling has been pretty heavily refactored for beta 4 to enable running Vaadin applications behind a proxy server. To support this the framework uses relative URLs for all operations.
API changes
BrowserDetails has been removed. Use Page.getWebBrowser() or Page.getFragment() where you have used BrowserDetails methods.
Page.getLocation has been added, providing the location in the address bar of the browser.
Eclipse Plug-in improved
The Eclipse Plug-in now supports Vaadin 7 versions better and provides a separate wizard for creating Vaadin 7 projects. Remember to use the experimental update site to test it.
Dependencies extracted
Part of the dependencies which were previously bundled within the vaadin jars have been extracted and are now defined as external dependencies instead. In the long run, this will reduce the size of the Vaadin jars.
For short examples on how to use the new features, check out the Vaadin 7 mini tutorials:
https://vaadin.com/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Vaadin+7
For information on how to migrate from Vaadin 6 to Vaadin 7, see
http://dev.vaadin.com/wiki/Vaadin7/MigrationGuide
This is an beta release so we expect there to be bugs. We will no longer be making large new features but finalization of the current features might still affect API in some places. All your comments on the new features are welcome. Please post all Vaadin 7 related comments in the Vaadin 7 category.