Vaadin 7 beta1 is packaged in a dependency manager friendly way
Modularized - not monolithic
Vaadin 7 alpha 3 was packaged as one huge jar file, which turned out not to be a good idea at all. The mix of server side and client side classes together with dependency classes had some compatibility problems in addition to being over 50MB. For beta1 we completely changed the packaging to be more modern, to give you more control, to be more dependency manager friendly and reduce the download size.
Vaadin modules and dependencies
The huge Vaadin jar file has been split into 7 different jars, each with a given purpose (server, client, shared, etc). Typically you use vaadin-server (including dependencies), vaadin-client-compiled and vaadin-themes to start a project. Add a custom widget set and you additionally need the vaadin-client-compiler jar but can drop vaadin-client-compiled (which contains a precompiled DefaultWidgetSet). By declaring dependencies instead of bundling them we are also able to reduce the size of the jars you need to download (dependencies are only downloaded once).
Not everybody likes dependency managers
If you don’t like dependency managers but want to manage the jars yourself - no worries. Instead of making you download the jar files individually, look through dependency specifications and trying to find everything needed, we have provided a zip file for you. The zip file contains both the Vaadin jar files and the needed dependencies. To get started, just drop the jars in your project and you are ready to rock.
We do recommend a dependency manager, however, because it is easier for upgrades. Trying to avoid Maven? Keep in mind that there are more dependency managers out there than just Maven.
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 beta release so we expect there to be bugs. We will no longer be making large new features but finalization of the current features might still affect API in some places. All your comments on the new features are welcome. Please post all Vaadin 7 related comments in the Vaadin 7 category.