Progressive Web Applications will become the norm
Progressive Web Applications (PWA) turn a web app in to a native-like experience, which is installable on the home screen, gives a full-screen experience, loads instantly, works without a network connection, and allows you to re-engage customers with push notifications. They enable using the same code base for multiple platforms, even for the UI. There are several indicators that PWA is gaining traction: Microsoft embracing the concept, while popular apps like Twitter, and ClickUp are built as PWAs. With more native features being made available for the web, the need to creating native applications will diminish.
Starting from Vaadin 15 we will enable adding client-side views along side your Java views. This allows you to choose whether you want to use server-side Java or client-side TypeScript for the UI logic. This enables adding stateless, client-side views that offer quicker UI interactions and offline support that many modern web apps require. We see this as especially beneficial for development teams that have Java and Front-end developers working side-by-side.
Framework agnostic components
Web Components is the standard foundation for web applications today, supported by all modern web browsers. With this, we expect it to be at the core of framework-agnostic design systems.
Vaadin has built a component library based on the web components standard for many years and continues to do so. To improve performance, we will adopt LitElement as the main technology for our components. Java developers will benefit from this with close to no changes to their code. Additionally, we will make building data-intensive apps even more productive with our components and enable new use cases like adding collaborative features to business web apps.
Development is a team effort
Applications are built by teams, and increasingly those teams are cross-functional; developers, designers, analysts, QA, ops, etc., iterating on the product together. Meanwhile, "working together" is getting re-defined, with a distributed workforce and more flexibility in the workplace. For instance, Google has provided collaboration in their apps (Docs, Spreadsheet) for a long time already. In design space, Figma has been very successful in enabling collaboration in their online product.
Vaadin has always focused on the developer experience with our framework and tooling. While this remains our focus, we will expand our tooling to enable cross-functional development teams to reduce the need for time-consuming handovers.
Our developer tooling will enable developers and designers to collaboratively write & design UIs online. We are in particular looking into how we can evolve start.vaadin.com into a tool useful throughout the development project.
Design systems
Design systems combine UI components, usage patterns, and documentation into a reusable package. We see two significant benefits in a design system: it ensures a consistent look and feel across an application portfolio and makes the developers more productive as they can reuse predefined UX patterns. Today we see large corporations embracing design systems, and we predict small and medium-size companies will follow.
We will publish the Vaadin design system that companies can extend to make their own. We will invest in tooling that enables your team to take customize the component set and adjust its theme to your brand. All this while making it easy to keep it up-to-date with our latest components.
Real-time collaboration features made simple
Collaboration features in business applications will become the norm as user expectations get shaped by applications like Google Docs and Slack. This change is fueled by an increasingly distributed workforce and flexible working hours. In the future, employees will expect to be able to work anywhere, anytime.
We currently provide components and a backend service that allow developers to build collaborative editing features into web apps with just a few lines of Java. The ready backend service automates all data and user-state synchronization, allowing developers to focus on building the best possible collaborative web experiences for their users.
We are currently working on adding even more functionality, such as real-time discussion features, rich-text editing and TypeScript APIs for Vaadin Fusion.
