It has mostly been business as usual since the last update - lots of small things worth mentioning but nothing as spectacular as the release of Vaadin 7.0.0 last month. Maybe the biggest of the small things is the first maintenance release for Vaadin 7, including a whopping 51 fixes and small enhancements, compared to the 10 - 15 fixes typically included in our maintenance releases. The majority of the fixes have been related to the Sass compiler, layouts and client-side performance. The performance fixes also includes a new profiler that lets you investigate the performance of the framework as well as your own client-side code. More optimizations and assorted bug fixes are included in 7.0.2, which will be released later today. We have also released Vaadin 6.8.9 with some fixes.
Work on new features for Vaadin 7.1 has also begun with promising progress integrating Atmosphere Framework into Vaadin for full-featured server push support for modern browsers and transparent fallbacks for the rest of the pack. A functional proof of concept was made in less than a week, after which focus has shifted towards extending the core API to enable plugging in any communication method and providing the Atmosphere integration as the default implementation. One new feature that has already landed in the master branch (from which 7.1 will be branched before the release) is basic support for arithmetics in the Sass compiler. You can already try out a nightly build, or wait until the end of March for a beta release. One final highlight for Vaadin 7.1 is that we have made it easier set up a development environment for making your own contributions to the project.
Independent of the core framework roadmap, we are also making updates to our CDI integration, aiming for an official alpha release towards the end of the month. With all these things going on, there is unfortunately not much time left for prototyping high risk features that we might want to include in Vaadin 7.2 or subsequent minor releases. Rest assured that we will be drawn back to inventing the future once we are satisfied with the new stuff going into 7.1.