There was recently a regression where a backwards incompatible change broke couple of important add-ons (and via those several actual applications). It happens, and it will happen in the future as well, part of the business. But it triggered me to implement a project that we have planned for at least a decade, that hopefully helps use to break less things in the future, let me introduce you Vaadin Ecosystem Build.
The idea of the Ecosystem build is to to build open source add-ons (and also actual Vaadin projects) agains latest snapshot versions (and latest release). This will hopefully give relevant information for both Vaadin users and the development teams.
- Give early feedback for development team members if they accentally broke something
- Let the development teams be more confident when making an “educated guess” that a technically incompatible change wont break anything and shipping more fixes in patch releases
- Help community members maintaining their components and projects to prepare for upcoming versions.
This is a very early trial, but I’m already very happy to include your open source Maven project into the set. Just verifying that thing compile is already helpful in many cases, but even better if your project has some actual unit or E2E tests. Propose via GitHub (PR or an issue). For the first iteration I picked some addons I know are used a lot and one demo project of mine.
It is essentially a simple jbang script that checks out some open source Vaadin projects and checks compatibility. Currently only supports Maven projects, but if there is interest, Gradle support is probably quite easy to add (I’m already waiting to see a PR from @mavi1 waiting for me on monday morning 
). Currently the build setup is configered with GH action and one private builder with decent resources and lives on my GH account, but my idea is to get this setup to be something that our R&D department maintains and monitors in the future.
Any Ideas how to improve the setup?