Vaadin 7.3 for Liferay released

As you might know Liferay comes bundled with Vaadin. Now that Vaadin 7.3 is out as of today, it is perfect time to update your Vaadin portlet. Vaadin 7.3 is the largest release since Vaadin 7 in February 2013. Its largest enhancement is a parameter driven look and feel, powered by Sass and CSS3. With just a few parameters you can completely change the look and feel from iOS6 round to Windows8 flat or anything at all. 

In Valo one parameter, such as the background colour, not only changes the background, but also derived colours in drop shadows and text colors so that as high usability as possible is achieved. Finally you don't need to be a skilled UI designer to design applications that always look beautiful. And, even with its default values, Valo fits alsmot perfectly into the default Liferay 6.2 theme and thanks to stronger selectors it has less conflicts than the old “Reindeer” theme. Thus, I like to say that Vaadin 7.3 is built for Liferay.

To keep working with Sass based themes as easy as possible, we even built our own Java-based Sass compiler that we have open sourced. It compiles the new theme about twice as fast as the original Ruby based compiler.

Try out Vaadin 7.3 today by updating your version to 7.3.0 in pom.xml of your self-contained Vaadin project or by updating your shared vaadin libraries to 7.3.0.

Check out the release post and the Valo page itself.

 

[Jaslynn joan]

Hi,
Great work...Amazing Valo visual theme and I like its features... Thank you for posting this...

Thanks.
Jaslynn,
Svasamsoft

[Jack Bakker]

Heavy duty awesome. I still need to check the responsiveness of such within Liferay already-responsive layout/theme.

[Matti Tahvonen]

Thanks!

With Vaadin it has always been possible to do responsive desing, with plain Java. This way easier for most developers than to fight with CSS.

But, if you have some CSS guru who is mostly responsible about your apps users experience as well, you can nowadays also do responsive layouts with CSS as well. Check out a class named Responsive in latest Vaadin versions for more info.

cheers,
matti

[Ivano Carrara]

Hi all,

Please, why all people are talking about the beauty of Liferay and Vaadin togheter, and no one man in the world wrote a clear and simple example to build a CRUD portlet for Liferay using Vaadin and data persistence managed by Liferay's service layer ?

Why no one is so gentle to show us and example using Vaadin user interface and services classes generated by Liferay's Service Builder ?

Thank you for any comments on this !

Ivano C.

[Matti Tahvonen]

Hi Ivano, this is something that we really should have done. And, to tell you the truth, we need those for other even more popular platforms as well, like plain Spring and Java EE. Vaadin is pretty easy to integrate to any JVM based technology, but full blown examples would indeed be much more helpful. I think we have lost several evaluators because of this :-( We have acknowledged this lately and I hope we have some cool high quality examples to show within next year.

[Ivano Carrara]

Matti, thank you for your comment !

I can't wait to get some cool high quality examples as soon you can !

Ivano C.

[Paola Greco]

Sorry Matti,

But how do you explain this post on Liferay Forum?

https://www.liferay.com/it/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/43336035

So.. Does Valo work well only under the 6.1 version of Liferay?

[Paola Greco]

Done.. dysplayed valo-dark on liferay 6.2

[Matti Tahvonen]

Hi Paola, glad you made it work. I think the liferay version doesn't affect that much. If there are conflicts with CSS, it is most often pretty easy to solve if you master CSS.

[Paola Greco]

Yes, or if you find pretty code samples around ;). But, did you develop a platform for people who master Java and are not so expert on JavaScript and CSS, didn't you? So, I think you and other Vaadin people are doing a very good job.. but there are still some contradiction in the paradigm. The face of Vaadin is: RIA with plain Java and the practice is Java + good knowledge of CSS. And yes, if you want to write a Vaadin application with a totally original presentation I think you have to master CSS. I would think to add at Vaadin IDE plugins assistive and graphical instruments to develop, manipulate and target problems of CSS.

[Matti Tahvonen]

Hi Paola!

I agree that we haven't abstracted theme building as well as we have succeeded with other web development "inconveniences" like html/DOM, JavaScript and browser differences. Valo was a major effort to help you all here. Now you can do pretty large changes to the default them just by changing simple sass variables in your extended variation. No need to understand various layout modes etc. New personal themes can now be built in matter of minutes, as previously it took days, even for advanced users.

We are working on our examples on this area as well, but until that, check out our valo demo app, that contains couple of example variations:

https://github.com/vaadin/valo-demo/tree/master/src/main/webapp/VAADIN/themes

[Paola Greco]

Valo is a very good job, with its entry points. And also, I think, it would be important to solve the overriding problems with the Liferay css in a structured way. I used !important to avoid them but are there any correct yet simple solution available for a Java developer?