Is Vaadin 14 really ready for production?

General
1

I am using Vaadin over years - starting with Vaadin 7.

Actually I am involved in backend solution for a customer project. We all love Vaadin 8 with the focus on Java. An UI based on Java and tons of code for the business logic - this combination rocks. We integrated many Add-Ons to avoid to reinvent the wheel.

Now we are looking for possible migration path to Vaadin 14. The biggest problem seems the missing integration of popular add-ons for Vaadin 14.

e.g. we use the Ace-Editor-AddOn to display SOAP-XML messages from the Hardware for diagnostic purpose. I tried to write a little Vaadin 14 project to integrate the Ace-Editor-AddOn knowing that this add-on is broken for Vaadin 14 due the annotation changes and the fact that the Ace-Editor-Template is a Polymer 2/bower project.

I am not a expert for JS/NodeJS. I played around with the migration tool, I tried manual fixes to get the Ace-Editor-AddOn running. I failed…
As a Java programmer I am not really happy to fight with npm/bower/Polymer 2/3 problems.

Therefore my question - is Vaadin 14 really ready for production, knowing that many old Add-on will not work?

2

Vaadin 14 itself is production ready, but just as you noted, the collection of available add-ons is still much smaller than Vaadin 8.
If your application is vitally dependant on an add-on that doesn’t exist yet in Vaadin 14, but does in Vaadin 8, then the best decision would be to stay on Vaadin 8 for that project until such an add-on exists or you ported it to Vaadin 14 yourself.

But all this doesn’t mean that Vaadin 14 isn’t production ready yet. It’s just that there can be some Project requirements that are not yet achievable with Vaadin 14. You need to give the community some time to provide more add-ons. When Vaadin 8 went production ready, there weren’t as many add-ons available for it as there are now.

3

Just a sidenote, Vaadin 8 will be officially maintained (at least) until February 2022, so there’s no immediate need to migrate away.