Jmix 2.8 Is Released

Jmix 2.8 is here. With this release, we continue to improve the framework and Studio, making Jmix a stronger foundation for enterprise development. Jmix 2.8 is also an LTS release and will receive three years of free maintenance.

Below is a brief overview of the main new features of Jmix 2.8. You can find the complete list of changes in the What's New section of the documentation.

New Features and Improvements

• Studio Improvements
  Studio now lets you choose the target bundle directly in the Localized Message dialog when a project uses additional message bundles. It also supports .env files for externalized configuration, which helps keep environment-specific values outside of application.properties and makes local development and deployment setup cleaner.

• SAML Add-on
  The new SAML add-on provides predefined Spring Security configurations for SAML 2.0 to simplify logins via trusted enterprise identity providers such as Microsoft Entra ID, Okta, Keycloak, and others. It can map user attributes and roles from SAML assertions, as well as persist the user entity and role assignments after the user is successfully authenticated by the SAML Provider.

• Day Marks in Business Calendar
  The Business Calendars add-on now supports marks for calendar entries, not only holiday descriptions. This allows applications to classify special days more clearly and retrieve mark information through the API.

• Dynamic Attributes in Process Forms
  In the BPM add-on, dynamic attributes can now be loaded and shown in process forms based on Jmix views. This makes process forms more flexible when the data model includes attributes defined at runtime.

• Data Model Visualization
  The Data Tools add-on now provides a Data Model view in a running application. It helps developers and administrators inspect entities and their attributes, and also generate diagrams using PlantUML.

• Support for @ElementCollection
  Jmix now supports collections of basic values, FileRef, and custom types in JPA entities by using @ElementCollection. These attributes can also participate in fetch plans, filters, and UI components that work with multiple values.

• Facets in Fragments
  Fragments now support facets. This makes fragment-based UI composition more powerful and allows developers to reuse richer pieces of view logic.

• SidePanelLayout Component
  The new sidePanelLayout component provides a declarative way to build views with a collapsible side panel. It is useful for showing contextual information or actions without leaving the current screen.

• SideDialog API
  The Dialogs API now includes a side dialog that appears as overlay attached to the side of the screen. This gives developers a way to implement interactions similar to the sidePanelLayout component but for the whole application window.

• Icon Improvements

  • Many UI components now support custom icons through nested XML elements. This gives more control over the appearance of buttons, uploads, menus, and other parts of the UI.
  • A unified icon mechanism based on the new JmixFontIcon enum and Icons bean makes it easier to replace default icons across the whole application.

Future Plans

The next feature release is expected in June 2026. We're planning to do the following:

• Upgrade the technology stack to Spring Boot 4, Vaadin 25, EclipseLink 5
• Provide an add-on that enables natural language queries over application data using LLM tool-calling and Jmix DataManager
• Integrate Reports with Vaadin Spreadsheet to design and render XLSX reports
• Provide an experimental version of Dynamic Model add-on that enables extending the data model and UI at runtime.

Our current roadmap is available on GitHub.

Conclusion

We invite you to update to Jmix 2.8 and explore the new features in your projects. If you have questions or feedback, join the conversation on the forum.

Thank you for being part of the Jmix community and for helping us improve the platform with every release!