Discussion about the future of Vaadin

Hi everyone,

With the new Vaadin 15 I have some concerns about the future of Vaadin.

What I think makes Vaadin unique in the field of software development (and the reason we choose Vaadin) is the Java oriented approach of building websites.
I’ve noticed an increasing trend where Vaadin focuses most of it’s resources on new technologies. All in all I don’t think that’s wrong necesserily.
What I see as a problem is that Vaadin Flow (10-15) itself is not working properly yet. Look at the many many bugs and how long some of the very important ones are still open. An example is the File Upload component where the basics don’t even work:
https://github.com/vaadin/vaadin-upload-flow/issues/63

Because Vaadin focuses it’s resources on new technologies the absolute basics are getting neglected. See the BigDecimal number field which only has a Javascript part but is not supported in Java (I tried), see:
https://vaadin.com/forum/thread/18026867/bigdecimalfield-doesn-t-seem-to-exist

Typescript is a very fine language, but if I want to use it I feel other technologies which have many years of experience are better suited like Angular, React, Vue.

Because of these observations I feel like Vaadin Flow (10-15) is not a proper choice for software development anymore and I’m better of using any of the above mentioned technologies.

I share this to have a healthy conversation about this (IMHO) serious issue about Vaadin’s future, because if my concerns cannot be taken away my Organisation may be forced to choose a different technology in the future.

Goede middag Sjoerd, thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts.

Rest assured that we are not leaving Java behind. In fact, the vast majority of our development organization is working to bring more value to V14 and our existing users. We have been hiring new people to join the team working on Flow which we hope will allow us to respond to customer feedback more quickly.

In fact we have more components available for Java than for JavaScript, and we will continue to grow this number and work to improve the existing ones.

Can you clarify your feedback on bigDecimalField? It is only available for Java, and not for JavaScript. Documentation can be found here: https://vaadin.com/components/vaadin-text-field/java-examples/number-field

If you can help clarify this in more detail, I’d be happy to follow up on your questions.