From 304495ae254883966080987c42653ea11002c736 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Avgustin Marinov Date: Wed, 22 Nov 2023 15:04:22 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] Doc - Vaadin 8 Discontinuation (#1486) Signed-off-by: Marinov Avgustin --- .../2023-10-22-vaadin8_ui_discontinuation.md | 29 +++++++++++++++++++ 1 file changed, 29 insertions(+) create mode 100644 docs/content/blog/2023-10-22-vaadin8_ui_discontinuation.md diff --git a/docs/content/blog/2023-10-22-vaadin8_ui_discontinuation.md b/docs/content/blog/2023-10-22-vaadin8_ui_discontinuation.md new file mode 100644 index 000000000..491bf4f3e --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/content/blog/2023-10-22-vaadin8_ui_discontinuation.md @@ -0,0 +1,29 @@ +--- +title: Vaadin 8 UI discontinuation +parent: Blog +weight: 99 +--- + +In this article, we want to give an overview of the future of the hawkBit UI + +## hawkBit Vaadin 8 UI discontinuation + +The hawkBit UI uses Vaadin as a web UI framework. It uses Vaadin 8 (8.14.3). This major version, according [Vaadin Roadmap](https://vaadin.com/roadmap), has no free support since 21st Feb 2022. There are some version releases after that date (8.15.0 - 8.16.0) that are Apache 2.0 licensed. However, since 8.16.1 ([see here](https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.vaadin/vaadin-server)) the license is [Commercial Vaadin Developer License 4.0](https://vaadin.com/license/cvdl-4.0), so they could not be used in hawkBit. + +We believe it is not a good practice to keep an out of free support library in an open source project like hawkBit. And moreover, even if we keep it, if a security vulnerability is discovered - all users shall opt for commercial support or to drop UI. + +There is another critical obstacle with keeping Vaadin 8 UI. At the moment hawkBit uses Spring Boot 2.7. According to [Spring Boot EOL](https://endoflife.date/spring-boot) Spring Boot 2.7 stream will reach end of support 24th Nov 2023. So, hawkBit shall be migrated to Spring Boot 3.0+. Since Vaadin 8 seem to be incompatible with Spring Boot 3 (they added support for Spring Boot 3 in Vaadin 24 ([Vaadin 24 pre release](https://vaadin.com/blog/vaadin-24-pre-release-available-for-spring-boot-3.0)) we shall drop Vaadin UI 8 anyway. + +Many months ago we asked for community help to migrate hawkBit UI to newer Vaadin versions - [Urgent migration needed to a newer Vaadin version +](https://github.com/eclipse/hawkbit/issues/1376) and gitter channel. However, there was no volunteer found to do the migration. + +All this being said, unfortunately, we've come to the decision to drop the Vaadin 8 UI from the Eclipse hawkBit and the latest hawkBit release 0.3.0 is the last version of hawkBit that includes it. For the next 0.4.0 release we plan to remove this Vaadin 8 UI. Thus the hawkBit may become an UI-less project. + +There were steps taken to mitigate the problem: +* extending the REST API +* introducing Swagger UI which allow easier use of the REST API + +however, the user experience will become much worse. + +We hope to see future contributions with migration of the UI or, why not, even new generation UI! +