Vaadin 7 released

Vaadin 7.0.0

It's great to see the Vaadin 7 release finally hit the streets.  I have updated the V7 code to use Vaadin 7.0.0, without any problems.

Demo

I had intended to provide an online demo, and have a server (a VPS to be more specific) all set up and ready to go - but then I ran into a problem with persistence (or to be more accurate, with the VPS set up which is affecting persistence) , so it will have to wait.  Hopefully not for long though.

Persistence

When I started putting the online demo together, I thought it would be interesting to log whether anyone interacts with it.   That meant providing some persistence, so I brought forward my intention to use a database.

I elected to try OrientDB, partly because it provides Object, Graph and Document database options in one.

I will post separately about that experience - but the main obstacle I found was their documentation.  Some of it is quite good, some not so good, but if you Google for it you can very easily end up with different versions of it.  They seem to have moved their code hosting around a bit.

Anyway, if you do want to take a look, do make sure you start the documentation trail here.

It is very early days, and I have only done some trivial tasks with it, but at first sight this database looks simple to use.

Lazy-loading

One thing which did catch me out is the lazy loading of data  ... and it is entirely my fault, as the documentation does say quite clearly that's how it works ... but I fooled myself by looking for values in the debugger;  they were not there of course, because they do not appear until the associated getters are called.

Definitely an RTFM moment that one ....