Dear all,
apologies for the naive questions. I would like to know what are the compatibilities between
the vaadin version on the development environment and that of the deploying environment.
Must they be exactly the same ? Thank you very much for any help you can provide me.
All the best.
Ideally yes; in other cases you might have different bugs in your production env and development env, which makes it difficult to test.
Within a major.minor release series, maintenance versions are backward binary compatible. Thus, an application written for, say, Vaadin 7.1.2 is guaranteed to work on every subsequent 7.1.x version without recompiling. Maintenance releases are also
usually
forward compatible, so an app developed for 7.1.8 usually runs on all earlier 7.1.x versions – the catch is that rarely, to fix a bug, some semi-public new API must be introduced, and apps using those APIs obviously won’t work on older Vaadin versions.
Between minor versions, such as 7.0 and 7.1, there are no compatibility guarantees except that migrating between minor releases should be fairly straightforward. Between major versions, like 6 and 7, there can be major API and functionality changes.
Note also that the version of the client side code (widgetset) and theme should match the exact version of Vaadin used on the server. Minor discrepancies might work, but might lead to strange bugs, and there is no guarantee that anything works if the versions don’t match.
In practice, this means that if you use a custom widgetset, you should recompile the widgetset with the version of Vaadin used in the production environment.