Vaadin Flow 1.5.0.alpha1 is a pre-release for the next minor Flow version.

Vaadin Flow 1.5.0.alpha1

Flow is a new Java web framework for creating UIs using Java or HTML. Flow handles everything related to communication between client and server and makes it possible to create UIs using the desired abstraction level you choose. It has all the capabilities you need to build a modern web app: from high level APIs for structuring your applications and binding data to it, into taking full control over the DOM and communication with HTML templates.

Flow is a part of the Vaadin platform. For information and helpful resources like documentation and examples on Vaadin Flow, please visit the Flow page vaadin.com/flow.

The complete documentation can be found here

New Features in 1.5

Possibility to embed flow applications
- there are still some features missing, tracking the epic ticket for the progress
Introduce two more ValueChangeMode: LAZY and TIMEOUT #4945
Create a generic low level mechanism for sending messages back to the server (#4927)

Fixes

Using HTML boolean attribute causes IllegalArgumentException (#5220)
Abstract view annotated with @route gets published (#5114)
Exception in ValueChangeEvent still freezes UI (#4979)
@theme Annotation sets the theme attribute in the body instead of the html tag (#4765)

Breaking Changes in 1.5

Deprecate getBodyAttributes and replace it with getHtmlAttributes #5019
Remove flow-html-components dependency from flow-data #5050
Deprecate @VaadinServletConfiguration #5052

Dependency updates since 1.4

Update byte buddy version #5026
Update jsoup version #5253

See the complete list of changes since 1.4.2

Supported Technologies

See the Vaadin platform release notes for browser, server and Java support level.

Known Limitations

Template-in-Template feature has some limitations

Work in progress

Embedding Flow applications #4316

Flow 1.4 Feature Highlights

Using Components to build UIs with only Java

With Flow you to can compose UIs using only Java on the server side. You can use existing components or create your own by creating the DOM from the server side. See the relevant documentation:

Integrating Web Components

Flow allows you to integrate web components and consume them from server side Java. See the web components documentation for more information.

Router

Router is a core concept in Flow, enabling navigation for your website or web app. It is based on HTML5 History API, and makes it possible to for the user to navigate pages back and forward, and keep the page state intact. See the router documentation for more information.

Binding Data to Components

Flow allows you to easily bind your business data to the UI components. You can bind the forms to the business objects by using the Binder, see documentation for more information. For showing a list of data (eg. a database table) on the UI, you can use the DataProvider. See documentation for more information.

Creating UIs Declaratively with Polymer Templates

With Flow you can take full control of building the DOM and the communication by using HTML templates. We recommend using Polymer templates as they bring lots of helpful capabilities on top of the native HTML. See documentation for more information.

Theming Applications

Flow has support for customizing the look and feel of your applications with css, html custom styles or by customizing the ready made Themes provided for Vaadin Components. See the documentation for more information.

Spring Integration

Flow comes with a Spring integration, and you can use it with Spring 5 or Spring Boot 2. Please see the documentation for more information.

JavaEE / JakartaEE Integration (CDI)

Flow support Java Context and Dependency Injection (CDI) with an add-on. Please see the documentation for more information.

Getting Started

For getting started with Vaadin Flow, please see vaadin.com/start where there are three types of examples available:

Bakery App Starter for Flow and Spring - a full stack example application with Flow and Spring Boot with heavy focus on great UX
Beverage Buddy App Starter for Flow - a small example app that highlights the basic features of Flow
Project Base for Flow and Project Base for Flow and Spring
- A base for your project with some placeholder files available and dependencies available
  All the starters bring the Flow dependency via the Vaadin platform, which is the recommended way for using Flow.

From Flow getting started documentation you can find a step-by-step tutorial.

vaadin/flow 1.5.0.alpha1 on GitHub