Vaadin 7 alpha3 contains a brand new Navigation API.
Easier to create navigable, bookmarkable applications
Vaadin 7 comes with a new set of APIs to aid creation of navigation within your application. Instead of handling everything yourself you have access to concepts such as View and Navigator, which will take care of most of the heavy lifting for you. Register your views and their fragments and watch Navigator handle movement between the views automatically. Parameters for the views are also supported. Browser back button will automatically work in your application.
Access Control and Login
You rarely create an application which is completely open for everybody and all users can do whatever they like in all views. The navigator API provides you with listeners to do access checks before allowing the user to enter a given view. On a related topic you can also have a listener for when the user is navigating away from a view, intercept him and ask questions like “Do you want to save your current work?” or the always popular “Are you really, really sure that you want to do what you indicated by clicking?”.
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 alpha release so we expect there to be bugs and still expect changes will be made to the API and functionality before the final 7.0.0 release. All your comments on the new features are welcome. Please post all Vaadin 7 related comments in the Vaadin 7 category of the forum.