As you might know Liferay comes bundled with Vaadin. Now that Vaadin 7.3 is out as of today, it is perfect time to update your Vaadin portlet. Vaadin 7.3 is the largest release since Vaadin 7 in February 2013. Its largest enhancement is a parameter driven look and feel, powered by Sass and CSS3. With just a few parameters you can completely change the look and feel from iOS6 round to Windows8 flat or anything at all. 

In Valo one parameter, such as the background colour, not only changes the background, but also derived colours in drop shadows and text colors so that as high usability as possible is achieved. Finally you don't need to be a skilled UI designer to design applications that always look beautiful. And, even with its default values, Valo fits alsmot perfectly into the default Liferay 6.2 theme and thanks to stronger selectors it has less conflicts than the old “Reindeer” theme. Thus, I like to say that Vaadin 7.3 is built for Liferay.

To keep working with Sass based themes as easy as possible, we even built our own Java-based Sass compiler that we have open sourced. It compiles the new theme about twice as fast as the original Ruby based compiler.

Try out Vaadin 7.3 today by updating your version to 7.3.0 in pom.xml of your self-contained Vaadin project or by updating your shared vaadin libraries to 7.3.0.

Check out the release post and the Valo page itself.