GSS or SASS?

Vaadin 6 / 7 / 8
1

At this year’s 2015
GWT.create conference, Ray Cromwell
 talked about GSS (
Google Stylesheets
).

  • Will Vaadin continue to support SASS?
  • Does Vaadin intend to support GSS?
  • Does Vaadin intend to phase-out SASS support?

Thanks in advance

2

AFAIK there is no plan to get rid of SASS, although there is now a “competitor” available via GWT.

If I’d need basic theme for my client side add-ons, I think I’d use GSS in the next version. This way the base theme would be available for the possible GWT users, who want to use only the client side of your awesome widget. That said, I still have never actually used GSS, but only the older CssResource in GWT.

With Vaadin’s application wide theme building you are probably better off with SASS in the future as well as our tooling is built for it. But naturally you can use raw CSS or any other CSS helpers with Vaadin as well. You can for example disable the SASS theme compilartion in your pom.xml and use LESS or delegate the SASS compilation to the Ruby based “original SASS compiler” and take advantage of other tools like the
compass
. The downside in this kind of setup is that in case some add-on uses the recently introduced Vaadin add-on support for SASS themes, their theme extensions won’t be automatically updated. But AFAIK, not that many add-ons do that.

cheers,
matti

3

Matti,

Thanks for the thorough and rapid response.

John