Vaadin 6 > 7 was a nightmare, now 7 > 8 seems the same?

General
1

Hi forum,

I’m not a developer BUT I’m trying to figure out if this is “normal” or if there is something else at fault here.

Moving form 6 > 7 took our develper weeks as much of our code had to be re-writen :frowning:

Now we can’t move from 7 > 8 as again it’s giving us major errors. We need improved UI and hence moving to 8 would be good.

Apparantly it’s todo with BeanItemContainer that is no longer used in 8. The API has been removed?

I’m keen to get some feedback and or suggestions on this from the community and try understand if our upgrade challanges are normal?

Onbvioulsy if this is going to happen on evey new Vaadin version we need to look at why we’re using Vaadin :frowning:

To me it simply doesn’t seem right so any broad answers or feedback would be fantastic.

Thank you!
42303.png
42304.java (48.2 KB)

2

Hi

Have you checked “Using The Compatibility Packages” section here:


https://vaadin.com/docs/v8/framework/migration/migrating-to-vaadin8.html

It is recommended to migrate applications with lot of Containers, Tables and other legacy components via so called Compatibily Package. This is optional set of jars in Vaadin 8, basically Vaadin 7 within Vaadin 8.

This way you get functional outcome fairly quickly. And you can do migratio to actual Vaadin 8 classes view by view.

3

From my experience a migration from 7 to 8 is
much less
 troublesome then one from 6 to 7. Most work is replacing the imports with those from compatibility package and within any reasonable IDE that tends to be just a few keystrokes/clicks.

4

True, but compability isn’t the same as converted. Many apps have a large number of views, tables, etc. and eventually they all need to be reworked. And our concern is that Vaadin 10 is right around the corner, and it seems quite different. If we have to suffer redoing all our views for 8, we have stalled our upgrades wondering if we shouldn’t look to do a UI overhaul and go to 10 directly.

5

We recently converted our applications from Vaadin 7 to 8, and the amount of work was substantial, but no nightmare.
It is correct, the compatitiblity-packes worked fine and by using them, we “switched” to Vaadin 8 quite fast… BUT you are correct,
these packages are no real solution for long term stability. This was the reason we why decided on the way to really convert to Vaadin 8, and the amount of work necessary depends on the control you use: TreeGrid is much nicer of course, but has a complete new DataBinding e.g. The bevahiour of databinding is different in some cases etc… In Our case we have many thousands of screens generated on the fly from our own GUI-Layer. Because of this we only had to change e.g. data-binding etc. for grids on one single place. THis was not that straight-foreward one might think, but in the end we’re happy now. Many controls are not that complex, but if you have to change all occurrences you have a problem…

In my opinion Vaadin 8 (without compat. packages) is a great framework that does the important parts right and got rid of some
really legacy stuff Vaadin 7 had to maintain for many years.
The changes form V7 to V8 are focused very strong on the server part of vaadin and are good!

If I get it correctly, Vaadin 8 → Vaadin 10 is focusing on the Client Part of Vaadin. If you use Standard-Vaadin controls with V8, your are in a really good position for Vaadin 10. BUT: if you have made a lot of adjustments / GWT / client-side programming with Vaadin 7/8 you have a new class of problems migratin V8 → V10 (we will have to rewrite most of this GWT stuff).

In the long term, the roadmap of Vaadin looks logical und good IMHO.