While we're still working at full steam, there has not been so much visible progress to highlight as we have mostly been fixing important but not spectacular bugs. We did release Vaadin 7.1 beta 1, but that was already covered in my previous update as well as in a separate blog post. We released 7.0.5 with various bugfixes a couple of weeks ago while 6.8.11 and 7.0.6 are being released as this is written.
One change worth mentioning in 6.8.11 and 7.0.6 and also coming for 7.1.0 is a fix to cope with some changed API in the upcoming Liferay 6.2 release. Provided the API does not change any more, Vaadin should be able to claim support for Liferay 6.2 the day it is released.
Looking into the immediate future, we're mainly focusing on fixing as many bugs as possible for upcoming maintenance releases. While pursuing beta 1, the backlog of important bugfixes to already released versions got slightly out of control but it is now once again heading in the right direction.
The final 7.1.0 version is of course also waiting around the corner. It should not bring any surprises compared with beta 1 unless a reduced defect count is surprising to you. There will not be any more 7.0.x versions once 7.1.0 has been released. Based on the current schedule, this would mean that 7.0.7 will be the final 7.0.x version as both should be done at roughly the same time. Maintenance updates to 6.8.x will still continue as before, i.e. with a new maintenance version every month.
The slightly more distant future holds various topics that we will research and hopefully incorporate into upcoming releases. Perhaps the most “interesting” of those topics is to discover a sensible way of doing data binding in client-side code (with automatic binding to a server-side data source) and then rewrite Table and ComboBox from scratch to use that API and also to provide their own respective client-side APIs so that the widgets can be used without a corresponding server-side component. Suddenly, other topics such as support for cross-site embedding and a refactored Visual Editor start to seem trivial.
That's all for today. Happy coding until the next update. We would especially like to hear your feedback from trying out Vaadin 7.1.0 beta 1!