Vaadin 6 or 7

Hi,

I’m new to Vaadin and I’m almost new to java too. I come from desktop world (Delphi) where developing of UI is so easy.
My team starts new project from 01.01.2013 to 01.05.2013. This project will have 100+ screens but my team is only 4-5 people that have a little of none experience with web technologies. This was the reason for me to think about using Vaadin as a main framework for UI of the project.
I’m thinking about Vaadin 7, but isn’t it too risky to use it because Vaadin 7 has not released yet? On the other hand I don’t know how many time and resources will cost me upgrade from Vaadin 6 to 7 if I choose to develop in v6. I know that after we release this project at 10.05.2013 we won’t be able to migrate version of Vaadin.
So could you give me some advice please which version to choose for development of my project?

Thanks in advance!

Hi.

If the project doesn’t have to support IE6 or IE7 then I’d already choose Vaadin7 over 6.
Vaadin 7 already has a stable api and the features have been frozen in Beta11 and RC1 should be just around the corner with a 7.0.0 hopefully coming soon after.

I would say it depends on your requirements as Vaadin 6 and Vaadin 7 are both very stable and mature.

Key-points you should have an eye on:

  • Vaadin 6 will be supported until Summer 2014, after that you can get professional support only for Vaadin 7.
  • Vaadin 7 on the other hand is not yet supported as it is indeed a prerelease. It is correct, that 7.0.0 should be out during the next month, but the Vaadin-team emphasizes Maturity and Stability more than a timely release
  • Vaadin 7 won’t support older Browser which were supported in Vaadin 6, so you should check first, if you still need those
  • Lot’s of things have gotten easier with Vaadin 7 as it doesn’t want to be platform-neutral anymore but fully focuses on the web. On the other hand, this might also be a drawback if don’t know what to do with all that power on your fingertips. Programming an Java-Web-App is a whole different thing than programming a Delphi-Desktop-program.
  • Documentation for Vaadin 7 is growing, but not yet as complete as for Vaadin 6. This might get a problem if you are going to work on some corner-topics like Offline-mode or custom widgets.

I would prefer Vaadin 6 if you are creating a web-app with planned End of Life before Summer 2014. Many of the new features of Vaadin 7 like the new Form-API or Converters can be emulated by using appropriate addons. Writing custom widgets isn’t as much fun as it is with Vaadin 7 as you must handle the state-serialization all yourself and it isn’t easy to integrate existing GWT- or Javascript-Widgets, but that isn’t needed most of the time.

Vaadin 7 should be used, when your application should work for a longer period of time as in the future, most topics on the forum, most documentation and finally also the professional support will focus on 7. You will have a few more difficulties in the startup-phase as the documentation isn’t complete yet, but on the other hand you will (hopefully) get a faster rendering and easier to maintain application. And once you are gathering experience in web-programming you will start to love Vaadin 7 for focusing on being a great web-app-library.