It was very useful addon and now we cannot anymore find it in Vaadin Addon directory.
John stopped maintaining several of his add-ons recently:
https://devsoap.com/eol-for-vaadin-addons/
You can find the source code still from github so you can build it yourself:
https://github.com/johndevs/dragdroplayouts
But why remove instead of deprecate? Even old binaries are still useful for Vaadin 7.6 and 7.7!
I agree with you. I don’t know about the details, I just remembered seeing that announcement and linked it here. Maybe you can contact John and ping him to answer to this thread.
This is too bad, and one reason why the add-ons are such a problem for enterprises. Relying on end users to maintain useful features that should be more easily made a part of the Core Vaadin is trouble.
Useful code like this (already saw that Animator stopped supporting Disclosure some 3 years ago though the 1.7 version still seems to work for us) would be nice to be incorporated in the Core Vaadin or a similar solution offered via the Core so we can ensure our UIs aren’t always in a state of trouble if we deviate and make use of add-ons.
Add-ons cannot be removed from the maven repository so all existing users can still continue to use them.
I don’t know why John, removed his add-ons from the Directory listing. I understand if he don’t have the time to maintain his add-ons, be that could just be announced in the add-ons directory page.
With add-ons and any other OSS projects, when stopping maintaining it, it would be good habbit to annonce on the project page that a new maintainer is being searched. The project can then be handed over to a new maintainer and it can keep on helping other people. If the ownership in the Directory needs to be changed for some add-on, let me know and we’ll change the ownership manually from DB (no UI for that yet :-).
Hi guys,
First of all thank you all for using the addon, it has been amazing to see so many people taking it into use!
When I made the addon a long time ago I didn’t expect that the addon would live so long, my assumption back then was that the framework would eventually provide the functionality out-of-the-box. But that never happened and so I have had to spend a lot of my time updating the addon to keep it updated.
The reason for me removing the addons from the directory listing is that after the year ends I won’t have access to the Directory account that I used to create the addons with which will make it impossible for me to maintain the binaries in the future. I don’t want to leave behind zombie accounts in my name 
I have thought about deploying the binaries either to Bintray or another repository which I could manage but I don’t know if I want to maintain the binaries in the future. For now I have restored the Directory page and the binaries are still available via the Directory maven repository.
I’ll look into how we could solve this in the future with the Vaadin guys, I’m sure we’ll find some good solution 
Thanks for all your hard work John. I certainly enjoy the use of your QRCode. It would be a shame to lose it. Echo David Wall’s comment - some of these addons become core functionality and it would be a significant disruption to lose them in an unplanned way. Such a loss could block an otherwise smooth migration to eg. Vaadin 8.
Comments about unplanned disruptions remain, but the business of replacing QRCode turned out to be easy:
Pattern adapted from: http://crunchify.com/java-simple-qr-code-generator-example/
→ use the byteMatrix to generate an SVGGraphics2D object
→ generate the svg xml file → use it to generate a StreamResource → use as source for an Embedded component which becomes the QRCode placed in a layout.
Done and tested in a couple hours. I can see why John might choose not to maintain a special Vaadin addon for that.
Hi guys,
Okay, so I have been brainstorming with some old timers at Vaadin to make this happen so that everybody in the community could be at ease that when an addon maintainer no longer has time to maintain the addon himself but the community is still interested in using it.
This is what we come up with:
- A new Github community “Team Parttio” was born (
https://github.com/parttio
)
The community consists of a group of Vaadin enthusiasts ranging from Vaadin employees to active outside contributers from different companies. The community as a whole is responsible for maintaining the addons, merging pull requests and building new releases of the addons when there is a need. Everybody in the community has a long history of building Vaadin applications and addons meaning that the quality of the addons should be top notch in the future as well. If you want to join the community you should be an addon contributer with a history of actively contributing to addon development.
The current members of the team are:
John Ahlroos @johndevs
Matti Tahvonen @mstahv
Sami Ekblad @samie
Tatu Lund @TatuLund
- A new addon group author was added to the Vaadin Directory
All addons which are managed by the Parttio community is published under a new user “Team Parttio” in the Vaadin directory (
https://vaadin.com/directory/#!browse/search=user:“Team%20Parttio”
). The community is responsible for deciding when a new addon version is released.
–
Currently my two addons qr4vaadin and dragdroplayouts have been moved over to be managed by the community. If you want to see any of my other addons
https://vaadin.com/directory/#!browse/search=John%20Ahlroos
remain in active development, feel free to comment here so we can move them over. Otherwise the Directory pages for these addons will be closed by the end of the year.
Great idea, guys!
-Olli
That’s great! It would be nice to have a dedicated forum thread for further news and discussions