The year 2014 has been a great year for Vaadin, just have a look at all the things that have happened in only one year. We’ve had two feature releases of Vaadin Framework during the year. Vaadin Framework 7.2 and Vaadin Framework 7.3 plus a very recent beta of Vaadin 7.4. But let’s start by having a look at a few numbers from 2014:
By far the largest release of the year was Vaadin 7.3 with the new Valo Theme engine. Valo helped you to create your application theme, while ensuring the design is well planned out of the box. If you haven’t checked out the dedicated Valo page, do so now.
Related to Valo, the Vaadin Sass compiler was also open sourced as a separate project. The Vaadin Sass compiler is the first fully Java based Sass compiler and considerably faster than the original Ruby version.
Besides framework releases, there have been several other as well very important ones, such as Vaadin CDI, new Archetypes, TestBench, TouchKit and Charts.
On the IDE side NetBeans saw a much enhanced plugin at the beginning of the year with integrated support for all add-ons in the Directory. (Plus we just released a sneakpeek into the new Add-on directory). The IntelliJ guys also released a new version of the IDEA plugin for Vaadin.
During the year we’ve gathered a better understanding of you in the community, by carrying out different surveys, the latest one being from October about your competence building, but also on Testing and more.
We’ve also had a handful of articles in the blog about topics such as:
- Introduction to Java 8
- Optimizing your hosting setup
- REST service usage in Java
- Responsve web design in plain Java
- Demystifying Web Components
- Writing re-usable UI code
- Embedding apps through CORS
- Consuming Web Components in Vaadin
- Packaging Web apps using PhoneGap
- Two-factor authentication in Vaadin
- Vaadin and Akka actor framework
- JAAS authentication
- Full stack apps with TomEE and Vaadin
- Using Spring Framework with Vaadin
- Tips for human readable charts
- Reactive Functional UI development with Vaadin
We’ve also covered testing and scalability in very detailed ways:
- Scalability testing
- Stress testing your apps
- Behavior Driven Development and testing
- Using JMeter for scalability testing
The website has also seen some tightly focused new pages, such as:
- Vaadin Introduction (Localized versions available)
- Vaadin and Security
- Vaadin and Themeing
- Vaadin and Accessibility
- Vaadin and Java EE
On the portal side, we’ve worked heavily together with Liferay by having a joint webinar, releasing a DZone Refcard for Liferay and Vaadin developers and releasing the open-source Tori forum project in Liferay Marketplace, and winning the entire competition with it.
Vaadin has also collaborated with many other technology enthusiasts, not the least in webinars about:
- Scaling with WildFly (RedHat Arun Gupta)
- JavaEE7 with NetBeans and Vaadin (Oracle Geertjan Wielenga)
- Scala and Vaadin (Typesafe James Ward)
- Spring Best Practices (Pivotal Josh Long)
- Vaadin Charts (HighCharts Torestein Honsi)
- Liferay & Vaadin (Liferay James Falkner)
Collaborating with IBM also took us to a whole new level, when Vaadin got included as the first 3rd party Boilerplate inside IBM Blumix cloud.
But Vaadin is mostly about YOU, and you’ve done some awesome things releasing over 168 add-ons in the add-on Directory, taking it up to almost 500 individual add-ons which have been downloaded 1.5 million times. You’ve also blogged and shared the joy which we’ve featured in the Community Spotlights. And you’ve written new books about Vaadin. And of course, all the success stories about applications you have written as well.
During this year, we’ve grown with 17 new people joining the team, bringing us to a total of 86 people. This year was also the first year for us to break the $10M turnover barrier. These have been some really exciting times showing huge growth for the framework.
Once a year it feels good to look backwards at what we’ve done together, but now the time is for looking forward! There are some really exciting things coming out in 2015 – something exceptional and something Apple would describe as Awesome and the best Vaadin since Vaadin. We almost can’t wait to show it to you...
P.S. The most successful blogpost of the year was our April Fools post about Vaadin moving over to C# – if you haven’t checked it out yet, have a good laugh and an awesome new year!
P.P.S Want to get a sneak peek of what’s going to happen in 2015? Join us at GWT.create in January, in Mountain View or in Munich. Sign up today!