Vaadin recently announced the discontinuation of Hilla as a stand-alone product. To me, this marks the end of an ambitious project and a personal journey.
An ambitious project
Vaadin introduced Hilla back in 2020. Over time, Hilla offered a very productive and unified experience for developers that wanted to build Single Page Applications (SPA) using Spring Boot and Java in the backend and React and TypeScript in the frontend. This approach was unique and clearly addressed some of the biggest issues that Full-Stack developers were facing when building web apps: End-to-end type-safety, seamless integration and a unified build-chain for backend and frontend.
While Hilla was clearly targeting an existing demand (popularity of SPA, React and Spring Boot), Vaadin had difficulties promoting Hilla sufficiently and reaching a larger audience of potential developers.
Vaadin put a lot of development efforts in Hilla, especially in 2023 and 2024. But starting with 2025 it was recognizable that Hilla slowly disappeared: No new blog posts, tutorials, videos or talks from Vaadin uniquely about Hilla. At the beginning, this seemed to be a consequence of a round of layoffs and internal restructuring that also affected the DevRel team. But throughout the year, it became more and more obvious that Vaadin was moving his focus and efforts away from Hilla. The developer activities on the GitHub repo slowly declined, and fewer and fewer new features have been shipped. Resulting in the 24.9 release webinar, in which Hilla was not mentioned at all. Talks about Hilla were also removed from the agenda of the Vaadin Create Conference 2025.
What the discontinuation of Hilla actually means for developers who operate Hilla apps in production or are currently developing new Hilla apps has not been addressed properly yet. According to the announcement, there will be no changes in the next major release 25 and the Hilla technology will remain functional for the foreseeable future. This probably means that the current Hilla feature set will be maintained for at least as long as Vaadin 25 is maintained. But I expect that building apps that only use Hilla (and not Flow) will be deprecated at some point. Information about potential migration paths for existing Hilla apps will hopefully be shared soon.
My personal journey
I discovered Hilla in late 2023, and I was immediately hooked, because it combined Spring Boot and React in a very productive way. While I was exploring Hilla, I also started to engage with its community, and I took the chance to write some blog posts about common Hilla use cases and questions. Along the way I could also help to improve Hilla a little bit, by giving feedback, filing bugs and contributing pull requests.
Vaadin recognized my efforts and announced me as a Vaadin Champion during the Vaadin Create conference 2024. Based on the positive experience with Vaadin and Hilla, I decided to continue my support for both. I created a talk to showcase some of Hilla’s unique capabilities and how it helps developers to overcome the gap between backend and frontend. Throughout 2025 I gave the talk about 10 times and I received very positive feedback about Hilla as a product.
But at the same time, I started to notice some changes in the communication and interaction I had with Vaadin regarding Hilla. It felt less reactive and supportive, compared to 2024.
The discontinuation of Hilla makes me sad. I expect that Hilla will slowly disappear and that only a part of it will remain to enable reactive UI components and views in Flow apps. It would be great to see more of Hilla remain, but Vaadin has to cover the bills, and Hilla obviously did not help them with this.