I have started two projects with Vaadin 6.7 and i am now considering starting my 3rd project with Vaadin 7Alpha 1 and then hopefully transition and migrate into the later releases up to the beta and so on. My question is as of now, is there a list of addons that will not work with VAADIN 7 (alpha 1 release). I find myself taking advantage of the wonderful add-ons listed in the directory and don’t want to move to this new version unless i can keep using the vaadin addons?
Has anyone moved to Vaadin 7 and if so were there any problems migrating existing add-ons and re building the widget sets?
Unfortunately there is no such list available. I would expect the most add-ons to require at least some small updates to be compatible with Vaadin 7 alpha 2.
As Joonas pointed out there is no such list. This is due to the fact the most addons in the directory are developed by the community which means it is up to each addon author to make the addon Vaadin 7 compatible.
In some cases making an addon compatible with Vaadin 7 will be easy and backward compatible, in other cases the addon will need Vaadin 7 specific changes which will break Vaadin 6 compatibility since the API is changing both on the server and client side. Especially this will be the case for those addons with a client side implementation. Alpha1 did not bring many such breaking changes but Alpha2 most likely will. This is probably why addon authors currently might be reluctant to support Vaadin 7’s early alpha releases.
As Vaadin 7 progresses through the alpha-stages making more and more good radical changes throughout the framework my guess is that more and more addons will break with Vaadin 7. This probably means addon authors will need to uphold two versions of the addon in the future, one for Vaadin 6 and one for Vaadin 7. This is why I hope the directory could be improved as soon as possible to make it possible for addon authors to publish addons for both Vaadin 6 and Vaadin 7. Until then you will have to build and fix the addon from source or ask the addon author for a custom version for Vaadin 7 in those cases where the addon does not work with Vaadin 7.
You can upload multiple versions of one add-on to the Directory, and mark to each what Vaadin version it supports. The versions won’t be visible at the same time, but at least you can distribute them from the Directory, until a proper solution is made.