Vaadin 7 beta 2 - HTML5 doctype, improvements and fixes

Vaadin 7 beta2 is the second beta release of the upcoming Vaadin 7. In total 67 issues have been fixed since beta1.


Doctype is now HTML5

Starting from beta2 we are using the HTML5 doctype. While this should not cause too much problems it might have some effect on empty HTML elements and similar. We had to update a whole bunch of tests and fix some theme issues to make things work properly.


Low level API changes

There is an API change in beta2 which affects everyone: WrappedRequest is renamed to VaadinRequest - update the parameter to your UI init method accordingly. Some similar renames were done to make the class names more consistent. There has also been a lot of work done on the low level VaadinServlet, VaadinPortlet,VaadinService and VaadinSession classes.


Improvements

Navigator has been improved with support for an error view (or view provider) which is called when no suitable view has been found.
It is now easier to add a custom UIProvider using the “UIProvider” servlet parameter.


Bug fixes

There were some major problems found in beta1 after release, namely that multiple servlets and/or portlets did not play nicely when deployed on the same page. This has been fixed in beta2 along with several other issues such as problem with serializing VaadinSession. Vaadin 7 beta1 was also a bit chatty and sent (sometimes a lot) of extra data to the client. This has also been fixed in beta2.


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.