We're excited to highlight the powerful advancements packed into Vaadin 24. This series of releases (from 24.0 through 24.8) reflects our continued focus on making Java web application development faster, easier, and more productive. This evolution brings a wealth of new features, performance enhancements, and tools designed to boost your developer productivity, and meet the demands of modern user experiences. Whether you're building with 100% Java (Flow) or embracing full-stack React with Java (Hilla), Vaadin 24 empowers you to build robust, flexible, and future-proof business applications.
Let's dive into the most exciting highlights of Vaadin 24!
Simplicity and developer experience: Building faster, smarter
Vaadin’s mission is to make business application development simpler and more efficient—and Vaadin 24 takes that further than ever. This release brings noticeable improvements that make everyday development tasks faster, more reliable, and better aligned with the needs of modern, full-stack teams.
- Faster development cycles: Experience dramatically reduced reload times for Java changes, with small "Hello world" apps reloading in just 1.2 seconds, a 62% improvement. Build and start-up times have also been streamlined thanks to a pre-compiled front-end bundle, which often removes the need of the time consuming front-end bundling altogether.
- Intuitive tooling at your fingertips:
- The Component Locator in DevTools (nowadays in Copilot) allows you to click any UI component in your application and instantly jump to the relevant code in your IDE.
- Simplified theming now fully supports
::part()selector and native CSS, meaning all your CSS can be regular, non-Shadow-DOM CSS. - Improved JRebel integration now re-renders only the affected parts of the Vaadin UI, avoiding full-page reloads.
- Gradle and Maven optimizations ensure faster execution for build goals and configuration caching for Gradle users.
Design system and UI components: Intuitive and accessible UIs made easy
Continuous improvements to our UI component library and design system remain a core focus, ensuring your applications are not just beautiful but also accessible.
- Enhanced accessibility: Ongoing work ensures alignment with WCAG 2.1 standards, including ARIA label APIs and optionally showing mouse focus rings.
- New components for rich UIs:
- Navigation component: Streamlines standardized, visually engaging menus.
- Popover component: For rich tooltips and notifications.
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- Dashboard component: Makes it easier to create visual dashboards.
- Card component: Provides a "great-looking, accessible, and configurable" modern UI pattern without any CSS.
- Gantt chart: Vaadin Charts now supports Gantt charts with drag & drop editing.
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- Markdown component: Render Markdown directly in your UI, perfect for AI-generated content.
- Master-detail layout (preview): Helps build responsive master-detail interfaces.
- Significant component enhancements:
- Grid improvements: Experience faster performance, lazy rendering of columns, shift-click multi-select, and new Spring Data API for simplified lazy loading setup.
- Form layout: A new layout model for responsive forms with any number of columns.
- Message list: Supports Markdown and append-text APIs for streaming AI-generated content.
AI-powered development with Vaadin Copilot: Your intelligent sidekick
Vaadin Copilot is a game-changer for UI development, acting as an "AI sidekick" and "pair programming partner". It's designed to assist you with all UI-related tasks, fundamentally changing how you build interfaces. Copilot fully supports both Vaadin Flow and Hilla.
- Intelligent UI editor: Edit your live UI, and watch as Copilot updates your code in real-time – your code always remains the master.
- Natural language interaction: Simply communicate with Copilot in natural language to change layouts, or even "design you a tax form".
- Advanced capabilities for enhanced productivity:
- Custom components support: Work seamlessly with your own custom and composite components, enabling drag-and-drop and property editing.
- Figma integration: Easily copy your design from Figma and paste it into your Hilla or Flow view, instantly recreating the component tree and layout.
- Automatic Form generation from domain objects: Drag your entity object from the IDE to the UI, and Copilot will auto-generate matching form fields.
- Automated internationalization: Get automated translations to kickstart your localization workflows.
- Test generation with AI (Experimental): Automatically generate test cases to prevent regressions.
- Generate dummy data: Quickly populate charts (Hilla only) and even JPA entities, repositories, and services with sample data.
- Create a view based on an image: Provide an image of your desired UI, and Copilot will set up the layout and components for you.
- Version upgrade helper: Identify and update outdated Vaadin-related dependencies with ease.
- Properties editor: A new visual tool to configure components, exposing properties not directly editable on the canvas.
- Visual theme editor (free preview): Visually fine-tune the appearance of your UI components in-app while in Development mode, with real-time reflection in your code.
Unified platform, flexible choices
Vaadin 24 brings both of our open-source frameworks together—Flow and Hilla—into a unified platform. Flow offers a 100% Java UI experience, while Hilla enables full-stack development with Java and React. Together, they give you the flexibility to choose your preferred approach for your project without compromising productivity or performance.
- Flow framework enhancements: Flow contains dozens of backwards compatible enhancements like a more flexible alternative for Spring Security integration, integrations to new browser technologies like Web Push Notification and Web Storage and improved support for Java records.We've strengthened Flow's resilience and security with improvements like fault-tolerant messaging and OAuth2 logout. A new experimental API for reactive UI state with Signals offers a simpler, more declarative way to build backend-driven UIs in plain Java. File handling has also been streamlined with simplified APIs.
- Hilla framework advancements: Hilla now boasts enhanced native file upload capabilities, React 19 support, and type safety improvements like Kotlin form validation and JSpecify nullability support. Lazy Loading in the File-System Router reduces initial JavaScript bundle size, improving startup performance.
- The power of hybrid applications: Vaadin 24.3 introduced the exciting feature to combine Flow views with Hilla+React views in a single application. This allows you to leverage the strengths of both frameworks. Starting from Vaadin 24.4, you can choose your preferred level of abstraction: either stay 100% in server-side Java or combine it with frontend React.
Application management and deployment: Simplify your DevOps with Control Center
Managing applications, especially in Kubernetes environments, can be complex. The Vaadin Control Center simplifies this by providing a centralized hub for deployment and management.
Database management in Vaadin Control Center — view and run migrations, manage backups, and schedule automated restores directly from a unified interface.
- Effortless installation: Now install with a single Helm command.
- Built-in "building blocks": Integrate user management, login, and internationalization into your applications effortlessly.
- Enhanced security: Control Center now supports Passkey authentication via WebAuthn, allowing secure device-based credentials like fingerprints or facial recognition for logins.
- Observability and automation: Enjoy a built-in Log Viewer for analyzing application logs, automated domain and certificate management, environment variable management, and new PostgreSQL database management capabilities including automatic provisioning, Flyway-based schema migrations, and on-demand/scheduled backups.
Modernization and legacy migration: Maximizing your existing investments
Vaadin 24 provides dedicated tools to help you migrate older applications and reduce transformation effort by up to 90% compared to a full rewrite.
- Modernization Toolkit:
- The Dragonfly Transpiler automates migration from Vaadin Framework or Swing to Flow.
- A Feature Pack eases migration or adds "retro cool" features from Vaadin 7, Vaadin 8, Swing, AWT, JGoodies, and NetBeans to new apps.
- The MTK Analyzer audits code dependencies and estimates automation potential for Java migrations.
- Expanded Vaadin 7 Support: The toolkit now provides estimated 80% coverage for typical Vaadin 7 applications, including data binding, components, and utilities.
Performance, security, and ecosystem: A solid foundation
Vaadin 24 also brings crucial advancements in core areas:
- Performance and scalability: Quarkus-based applications can now be built as native images, dramatically improving startup time and resource efficiency. We've also optimized component loading, ensuring faster initial load times.
- Robust security: The AppSec Kit (commercial) helps identify and manage open-source vulnerabilities, filtering out "false positives". Flow features enhanced authentication management, and we've introduced granular access control for navigation.
- Modern ecosystem & integrations: Vaadin 24 establishes a new technology baseline including Java 17, Spring Boot 3, and Jakarta EE 10. The Observability Kit integrates with popular tools like Datadog and Grafana. We've also graduated Web Push Notifications to an official feature, and the Collaboration Kit (now free and open-source) enables real-time collaboration features like synchronized field editing and chat.
What’s next: Vaadin 25
Vaadin 24 was about more than new features. It improved the stability, performance, and overall developer experience of the framework, making it easier to T, deploy and operate modern business applications that are fast, secure, and work well for teams. The release streamlines common development tasks, reduces complexity, and helps developers deliver high-quality applications with less effort—now and in the future.
With all that being said, it’s now time to look forward to Vaadin 25, which we expect to release later this year. Get a glimpse of what’s coming in V25.