Our JVx Vaadin UI is based on vaadin 7.7.9 right now. It works great but vaadin moves forward in big steps. The latest 8.1 release contains many new features and bugfixes. Not all fixes were backported to vaadin 7. This is bad but clear for us.

So we should switch to vaadin 8.1?

This isn't an easy task because vaadin 8 has some new APIs and vaadin moved some parts like FontAwesome to new AddOns. The ContextMenu AddOn was compatible up to vaadin 7, but 8 needs the new official ContextMenu AddOn. The data bindings will work with 8 but needs a compatibility layer.

But anyway, we decided to start the migration and will do everything step-by-step. The first task will do the update of all our vaadin projects to Java 8 and vaadin 8.1. The next step will do the integration of v7 compatibility layer and the following tasks will fix all other problems like ContextMenu, FontAwesome, changed APIs. It's a bigger project and we hopefully will be finished by the end of October.

This blog post is a notice for our vaadin UI users!

We'll keep you up to date

If you have a JVx application and want to use it without the frame border, it's not supported out-of-the-box. Sometimes it's very useful to have a full-screen application or to grab a screenshot without frame.

We now support this feature for Swing based applications but not in the official UI API. Here's a code snippet:

The trick with FULLSCREEN is necessary because the event fires sometimes more than once.

Simply press F12 key to toggle between Fullscreen/Frame mode.