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An important question facing developers with Vaadin 8 applications is how to best upgrade to the latest Vaadin Flow version. There are many ways to go about upgrading, and the choice can take both technical and economic factors into account.
When cost concerns dominate, or the Vaadin 8 application fits your functional requirements, a recommended option is to upgrade with the combination of Vaadin’s V8 Upgrade Automation and Classic Components. Since Vaadin 8 is extensive and has many thousands of classes and APIs, the fit of V8 Upgrade Automation can vary depending on precisely which classes and APIs the individual application uses.
So, how does V8 Upgrade Automation fit YOUR Vaadin 8 application? We now have an easy way to take a high-level measurement - a new tool called Minifinder. Minifinder is a free tool you can download and use yourself without having to ask for a Vaadin expert to make a detailed inspection of your source code.
Introducing Minifinder
Minifinder is built on the same technology as the tooling Vaadin uses to perform Migration Assessments. It is a static analysis tool that parses the Java in your project and resolves the types used in your application. So if your Vaadin application declares and invokes a method called “addComponent,” Minifinder will be able to tell (the same way your compiler does) if the invocation is related to the Vaadin method declared in the Vaadin 8 class AbstractComponentContainer or to your own (unrelated) declaration.
Minifinder ships in two variants - as a Maven plugin and an Eclipse plugin. Both plugins perform the same reporting tasks and should produce identical output for the same application, but they work with their environment differently.
Learn more about Vaadin 8 Upgrade Automation and Minifinder in our recent webinar.
Choosing the Eclipse variant or the Maven variant
If you or one of your developers already has Eclipse installed and configured for your application, you would probably find the Eclipse plugin variant to be easiest and most intuitively interactive to use. Installation is as easy as copying a JAR to the /dropins folder of your Eclipse installation, and the operation is as easy as clicking a button on the Eclipse toolbar.
If you do not have an Eclipse project or Maven project but a Gradle project, the Maven variant won’t be very useful for you, and it may be easier to figure out how to import your application into Eclipse than how to migrate from Gradle to Maven.
If your project is built on Maven, you would include relevant pluginRepositories and plugins into your pom.xml and run with a target;
mvn minifinder:minifinder
How to get Minifinder
The Eclipse variant can be made available to you through your Vaadin Account Executive. They can give you instructions on how to download the JAR and copy it to your Eclipse installation. If you don’t have an Account Executive or don’t know who yours is, please contact us.
You can find the Maven variant in the Vaadin directory. For more information on Minifinder for Eclipse, see the documentation.