Last year in review: 5 rounds keeping the code flowing

April 2017 marked the time where Flowing Code started to exist. Since then we’ve been learning, investigating, coding, delivering high value to our customers and also, maintaining a growing community. As we celebrate reaching this amazing milestone, here is a quick review of our last year.

New customers and challenges

Our main focus is to help our customers to achieve their goals by giving the required support related to evolve their software infrastructure, specially their main products. We have a lot of experience in enterprise application development, and one of the most complex systems to build in that field are ERPs (Enterprise Resource Planning applications).

These kind of applications have a special requirement that go beyond the functional and non functional requirements: they need to survive and endure over time, customers can’t simply change an ERP from one day to the other.

Achieving this in a world were new technologies emerge every minute could be rather difficult, specially if you want to focus on the functional features and not to waste time on keeping the application using the latest shiny framework that appeared last week.

We’re helping our customers to evolve their ERPs by assisting them providing the following services:

• Evolution Assessment: This includes understanding the whole architecture of the application, how the internal layers, components and services work together, analyze the dependencies and the platform version being used and finally by helping to elaborate a migration plan.
• Training their developers to grasp and master the latest tools and technologies that are required in order to implement and maintain the next version of their software.
• Creating PoC (Proof of Concepts) that will verify that a certain custom strategy can be implemented in order to take their ERP to the next level.
• Design, create and maintain reusable components and modules that they can use in order to add new features to their application.
• Provide development and consulting services in order to augment their workforce and support they technical needs during the process.

By following this path, last year we assisted three different customers that are in different parts of their journey to update their product to the latest technologies so they can support their customers with what they want.

We continued helping a customer from Spain that is evolving their ERP from an infrastructure point of view so they can offer the services in a completely secured cloud environment. We’re using Docker and several DevOps techniques in order to achieve their goals.

We started to help a new customer from Costa Rica that is upgrading their ERP based on Vaadin 7 to Vaadin 23. This involved basically recreating the views with the new version, but at the same time training them in the new technologies and also develop a way of making the transition easier.

Another customer from Argentina, wants to migrate the whole frontend technology to Vaadin, but at the same time upgrade the Java version and also the build pipeline and code versioning technology. In this case we started by providing them training services and all of the needed aspects before the actual migration.

Besides that we continue delivering our expertise by growing the team for an important open source company. During last year we specialized in custom component development for customers from all over the world.

Opening the source

Our set of open source projects that includes a growing palette of frontend component based on Vaadin and Web Component is growing every year. The most interesting part of this growth is that, as time passes, we see the community participating more and more, so we want to seize the opportunity to thank all of you for the feedback and also for the code contributions that make the virtual world wide team bigger and bigger.

Addons

The following new addons were created last year:

• WC Stories: This addon is based on this web component. The idea is to make things easier if you want to show stories like Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook or Snapchat.

• Year Month Calendar: This one gives the possibility of showing a calendar of the whole year with certain highlighted dates
• Image Comparison: With this component you can show a couple of images with a slider to compare both of them by just sliding back and forth.

The following addons had significant new features:

• XTerm Console: had a complete overwrite in typescript and support for Vaadin 22+
• FontAwesome: support for FontAwesome 6
• AppLayout: support for Fusion endpoints

Another interesting thing to mention is that we created and published some web components that can be used in virtually any web framework that is able to produce html output:

• Google Map: This was published by us a long time ago, but this is probably one of the most maintained versions of a web component that simplifies showing a google map.
• AppLayout & MenuItem: A couple of web components used internally by our AppLayout Vaadin addon, but they can be used to display a responsive layout in any web site. An online demo is available here.
• FontAwesome Iconset: This web component makes things easier when it is required to show FontAwesome icons on a web site by just using a web component.

For making it easier to get to all of this info, we’re improving our Open Source section to list all of these projects with their links.

Technical Articles

We wrote an article that explains in depth everything related to how to deal with one of the most complex Vaadin components: a TreeGrid.

One of our addons got support for communicating through fusion (now called Hilla) endpoints: AppLayout, so we wrote an article explaining how and shared a test project so you can play around with it. We’re planning to update the addon and the article so they can use Hilla instead of Vaadin Fusion.

Finally we investigated WebSockets API and Spring Reactive development model, and wrote a complete article that explains how to build an application that communicates with a crypto currency price provider and display the data in real time.

Participation in other communities

We provide consulting services to other companies targeting the open source world, and in that direction we helped by augmenting and evolving the set of components available in the Vaadin Component Factory GitHub Organization:

• Date Range Picker: This is a web component and a Vaadin Flow wrapper that allows to select a range of dates using a single calendar.
• Pdf Viewer: Also a web component and a Vaadin Flow wrapper that allows to render a pdf directly in the browser, by using pdfjs JavaScript library.
• Enhanced Grid: An extension of Vaadin Grid that adds extra features like a better support for filtering and selection.
• Timeline: A component that allows to show a timeline of events with several features, like drag and drop and handling of several produced events. It is based on vs JavaScript library.
• V8 Combo Box and Grid Layout: A couple of components that helps in the migration to Vaadin 10+ from Vaadin 8, by reproducing similar behaviors in ComboBox and adding a first version of the missing Grid Layout.
• Splide: A carousel component that is able to show images and videos with thumbnails and full screen support. Based on Splide.js JavaScript library.

We also coded most of the migration of the Spring Pet Clinic project to Vaadin Flow. The Spring Pet Clinic is a full stack sample application designed to show how the Spring stack can be used to build simple, but powerful database-oriented applications. For more information you can visit their Github organization or their site.

Constant Flow

Setting apart the technical aspects of our review, we also moved to new, bigger and better located offices so we can be more comfortable when we go to work.

We also strengthen our relationship with local Universities by continuing our internship program, and our idea is to continue doing this in the future. We’re fully committed to help in forming new software professionals and enlarging our team.

Finally we’re continuing with the investment of our time and effort in defining a baseline in order to ensure maximum quality in our service offering. We promise to tell more about this during this year.

All of this and more during the last 365 days. And more milestones reached on the last (and our first) lustrum, so wondering: What’s next?