We're excited to announce the release of Vaadin 24.2, our latest iteration, packed with remarkable improvements focused on boosting productivity, enhancing UI components, improving security, and expanding our support for modern web technologies. Here's what you can expect in this update:
Faster reloads
Now, you'll spend less time waiting and more time building your app! Reload time (the time between making Java changes and the browser refreshing to reflect those changes) has seen significant reductions in this release. Our benchmarks show impressive enhancement:
- Small, “Hello world” apps now reload in just 1.2 secs, down from 3.2 secs—a 62% improvement!
- Larger applications (with up to 1000 routes) have also seen reload times cut down from 5.2 secs to 2.9 secs, a 43% reduction.
New and improved UI components
Vaadin 24.2 brings several improvements to the UI component library, including
Third-party icons support
Integrate third-party icons more conveniently with the new support for SVG and font icons. This release simplifies the use of standalone SVG images, SVG sprites, and icon fonts, by providing support for them in the built-in icon component. All icon types are inline-rendered, making it possible to style them with CSS.
Enhanced Login component
The Login component is now more versatile with the addition of two new slots for custom content: one within the form and another in the footer area. From adding a "remember me" checkbox to incorporating single sign-on links, the customization possibilities of the login component are boundless.
More UI component enhancements
This release brings several other enhancements to the UI components, including making the Side Navigation component (initially experimental in V24.1) stable, introducing a new API for marking Grid cells as row headers (for a11y), providing a common Java interface for input field components, and offering a new API to retrieve the splitter position of SplitLayout easily.
AppSec Kit
The AppSec Kit is a commercial tool now available in Vaadin 24. The Kit enables developers to easily identify and manage vulnerabilities within their open-source dependencies directly from Vaadin Development Tools. The AppSec Kit,
- Produces a software bill of materials (SBOM) for your application, including direct and transitive dependencies.
- Identifies vulnerabilities in direct and transitive dependencies for your application and provides you with the details necessary to address those vulnerabilities.
- Reduces noise and wasted time by filtering out “false positive” vulnerabilities for dependencies in the Vaadin framework that have been ascertained to be not applicable by the Vaadin security team.
To learn more about how AppSec Kit can benefit your web applications, read the documentation or contact our sales team.
Web Push support (experimental)
This release brings experimental support for Web Push Notifications, which you can use to deliver real-time updates, reminders, and other important messages to end users. Users will receive notifications even when they’re not accessing the application and even if the browser tab hosting the application is closed.
AI Form Filler (experimental)
Vaadin AI Form Filler is an experimental API that allows developers to add AI-powered form-filling capabilities to their applications easily. Taking unstructured text as input, the API sends the text to ChatGPT with a prompt optimized to extract the relevant information from the text. The API then uses the extracted information to fill in the different types of UI components in the forms.
Theme Editor enhancements
The Visual Theme Editor tool now supports all Vaadin components. This tool enables editing the theme of Vaadin applications in development mode. You can use it to change the UI component color, font size, and more in views without editing code. Any changes you make are reflected in real-time, both in the live preview and in your code.
Other noteworthy improvements
This release includes several other features designed to improve your development process and the end-user experience, including
- Enhanced Gradle support: Reduced build time for development by caching results from previous builds.
- Server-side Web Storage API: a Java API to manipulate the similarly named browser API. This is handy in cases where there is a need to save some data that you want to be stored on the client side (instead of, for example, in the database).
- Plugins support for Development Tools window: an API allowing you to add your own custom tabs to the Vaadin Dev Tools window.
For a complete list of improvements, see Vaadin 24.2 release notes.