Aranea Blog

This year we are taking a trip to Barcelona by generous invitation of TheServerSide folks. The talk is Step-by-Step Legacy Migration with Aranea, which is an approach to use the Aranea Integration to migrate web applications from older web frameworks (and not to Aranea, but to any newer framework/technology). We are planning to announce the approach in full at the symposium, so be sure to register while there are still places

Also releases of several subprojects and Aranea 1.1 final are expected to be done by the time of the symposium, so that you could take immediate advantage of the new features.

It is our great pleasure to announce the release of the first milestone in the 1.1 development branch. This milestone includes following improvements:

• Component model. Components are now aware of their name and environment and can use it at any time. The scoping methods from InputData and OutputData have been removed. process() method was removed from the Widget class since it broke in some cases implicit assumptions about the Object-Oriented encapsulation. The component model is now truly OO without any surprises and objects can be used without any restrictions.
• AJAX support. With actions Aranea natively supports AJAX queries to any components. Although actions have been available since the first Aranea release, 1.1 supports sending unsynchronized actions to widgets, which allows implementing truly responsive UIs. Also the JavaScript API now provides methods to send and process actions.
• Partial render support. Aranea has long supported updating only small portions of the page with update regions. However in 1.1 only the surrounding widget gets rendered providing a huge performance boost and making the feature much more useful.
• Rendering model. Rendering was cleaned up removing dependencies between components other than environment. This includes removing the OutputData attributes and forbidding JSP tags to depend on other component tag context entries. This both allows the partial render support and true encapsulation, laying ground for the integration project.

The current reference manual is out of date and we do not yet provide a migration guide, so we suggest to wait until the next milestone before upgrading. However a comprehensive API changelog is available here. Download from SourceForge.