Reasons to upgrade?

General
1

I’m looking at an upgrade for a mature Vaadin web application running 7.1.6. The upgrade itself isn’t so bad in terms of effort, but our Selenium suite will take quite a bit of work to get passing again. (Reasons for this are not entirely clear, but some of it has to do with brittle locators generated by the test recorder, and inevitable changes to how the DOM is generated with the newer framework.)

So, in an effort to quantify the benefits of upgrading, I’ve compiled this list:

  2. Modern Browser matrix support
  3. Bug Fixes
    [list=1]
  4. 2 full years of bug fixes
  5. Some address pesky IE issues

    [/list]
  6. Supportability
    [list=1]
  7. Should a security fix be required, there is a possibility we’d be forced to upgrade out of the 7.1.x mainetance release

    [/list]
  8. Performance
    [list=1]
  9. Seems to be some fixes that deal with performance, but not sure

    [/list]
  10. New Grid component
    [list=1]
  11. Replaces table, and should be helpful for eliminating table bugs (scrollbars, sizing, etc) in new implementations

    [/list]
  12. Selenium driver improvements
    [list=1]
  13. Can run SE coverage with more recent browser drivers (currently we use FF 25)

    [/list]

We don’t pay for support, but if anyone felt like I was missing something or state something wrong, let me know. Also, is 3.1 correct? Would a security, or important bug fix be backported to older maintenance revisions?

2

Someone has said that don’t fix what ain’t broken. But the on the other hand, the longer you postpone the update, the harder it
might
 become to upgrade (Vaadin is API backwards compatible, so shouldn’t be a major issue). Bug fixes are probably the biggest reason to upgrade, unless you need/want one of the new features (push, grid, valo,…).

Regarding security fixes, those are only made to the most current minor version, so no, you won’t get fixes to the 7.1.x branch. In case you really need to stay with 7.1 and get some security fix, you could request for a custom build through commercial support.

3

Thanks for the reply. We’re going for it, as it will eliminate a lot of unknowns.