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2018 in Review

The year 2018 has soon come to an end and I think this is a good time to look at what has been accomplished this year before we move on to the next one.

We started the year in February by examining how we can improve keeping all those Maven dependencies in check and up to date by creating dependency version reports in Dependency version reports with Maven. In the article we learned how to leverage Groovy to read Maven plugin text reports and convert them to color encoded HTML reports.

In March the first version of the Gradle Vaadin Flow Plugin was released to support building Vaadin 10 projects with Gradle. The launch was described in Building Vaadin Flow apps with Gradle where we examined the basics of how the plugin worked.

In April the Gradle Vaadin Flow Plugin was improved to work with Javascript Web Components as can be read from here Using Web Components in Vaadin with Gradle.

In May the Gradle Vaadin Flow Plugin got its first support for Vaadin production mode. To read more about production mode check out this article Production ready Gradle Vaadin Flow applications.

We also examined how we can build robust, functional micro-services with Groovy and Ratpack in Building RESTful Web Services with Groovy. As a side note this has been the most read blog article the whole year so if you haven't read it yet, you have missed out!

In June the Gradle Vaadin Flow Plugin got support for Polymer custom styles as well as improvements to creating new Web components in Vaadin 10+ projects. The release notes (Gradle Vaadin Flow plugin M3 released) from that time reveals more about that.

In July we took a look at Gradle plugin development and how we can more easily define optional inputs for Gradle tasks in Defining optional input files and directories for Gradle tasks.

A new version of the Gradle Vaadin Flow Plugin was also released with new support for the Gradle Cache, HTML/Javascript bundling, Web Templates and Maven BOM support. Wow, what a release that was! The new features were described in Gradle Vaadin Flow plugin M4 released.

In September we took a look at using alternate JVM languages (Groovy and Kotlin) to build our Vaadin 10 applications with in Groovy and Kotlin with Vaadin 10.

While in October the Gradle Vaadin Flow Plugin got a new version again, this time with Spring Boot support and multi-module support.

The release also brought a controversial breaking change in requiring Gradle 5 due to the backward incompatible changes to the BOM support done in Gradle 5. However, it is starting to look like a good choice now that Gradle 5 is out and working for at least most of the community.

In late October or early November we also saw the second Devsoap product released. A new Gradle plugin Fn Project Gradle Plugin for building serverless functions on top of Oracle's FN server.

The plugin allowed to leverage Gradle to both develop and deploy the functions using all common JVM languages (Java, Groovy and Kotlin) both locally and to remotely running FN servers. The plugin is still in heavy development but already is used for projects around the world. To read more about the plugin checkout the article Groovy functions with Oracle Fn Project.

In November the Gradle Vaadin Flow Plugin went into Release Candidate state where the last bug fixes and improvements are still made to make the plugin a stable production ready release. This means it is very likely that early 2019 we will see the first stable release of the plugin so stay tuned ;)

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Looking back that is a whole lot of new releases and articles to fit into 2018. Beyond that the year has seen a lot of more minor releases and a lot of discussions on Github and elsewhere regarding the products. It has been good to see the communities we are involved in has embraced these new ideas and I'm certainly looking forward to what 2019 will bring.

Have a good new year every one and see you in 2019!