On behalf of the Vaadin team, I am pleased to announce a new minor release, Vaadin 7.6. The release contains a set of new features and hooks for new extensions, essential improvements for communication stability and a bunch of bug fixes.
As discussed earlier, the refactored communication layer is probably the largest enhancement in 7.6. By updating to the new version, your application users are able to survive from more severe network outages and those are more clearly displayed in the UI.
We have also continued our efforts on Grid. With Grid we have focused on features that have been essential for our main customers. Most essentially, columns can now be resized by end users as well, keyboard navigation is more customizable and there is the possibility to use “unbuffered editing mode”, which gives you the possibility to edit data directly in Grid and manage your own transaction logic.
Most components now also support “context click” events as low level events, and along that we have released the ContextMenu addon as a more generic and easier to use replacement for our “action framework” which currently only supports Table, Tree and TreeTable. The ContextMenu component can be assigned to virtually any component (like Grid, Button etc) and is already available as an add-on via Directory. We’ll keep it as a separate add-on initially, which gives us some freedom to move faster within initial iterations, but plan to include this as a framework feature when we feel confident about its API and implementation.
As somewhat less visible features, we have, for example, made it possible to use WebSocket connection on certain portal setups and improved some declarative APIs to support our brand new Vaadin Designer. Have a look at the release notes for a full list of tickets.