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The current reference manual is out of date and we do not yet provide a migration guide, so we suggest to wait until the next milestone before upgrading.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.

As one would expect from ‘friday-the-thirteenth’ release, 1.0.7 included an accidental change of form list behavior. This caused NPEs in use cases which were legal before 1.0.7. In new release, old behavior is back. We are sorry for any inconvenience!

Another ‘friday-the-thirteenth’ stable branch update is available, including the brand-new TreeWidget that was backported from development branch. It is easy to use and very flexible.

Some minor issues were also fixed. Next week we hope to bring you the first milestone of Aranea 1.1

Thanks to the great guys behind JavaPolis the “Object-Oriented Web Application Development” talk is up online on Parleys.com. Those of you who missed us at JavaPolis can now get a good idea what the talk was about (and hopefully enjoy it).

Includes support for asynchronous form updates, meaning that values in forms living in one ’session thread’ can now be easily modified from other ’session thread’ or widget’s action listener; no more need to do awkward method calls for modified values to actually take effect. Also, memory based list implementation makes fewer calls to database.

Download from the usual place, full changelog here.

Stable update of Aranea was rolled out last Friday and is available from the usual place. See changelog and note that tags used by example applications have moved to their own separate TLD namespace; previously examples mixed standard tags (conventional namespace prefix ‘ui’) with template tags (now have namespace prefix ‘tui’) which got rather confusing for first-time users.

One of the main additions is a “blank” example application, which can be used to kickoff new projects easier.

Some problems with asynchronous modification of forms (from widget actions or session threads) have surfaced; we will address these in next update of stable branch.

Although we have been silent for the last month or so it was not for the lack of activity. First of all, we are working hard on the integration and have setup both a separate subproject and a ChangeLogic project, so you can track our progress right away. The anonymous SVN access is available through HTTP: http://svn.araneaframework.org/repos/aranea-integration/branches/latest/. The project is still a bit raw and will only run in Sun Application Server (this only concerns JSF examples).

Secondly, we are working on the step-by-step legacy migration and are starting with first projects to be done this way. We will write about the concept and the success stories as soon as we have the latter.

Thirdly, we are working on cleaning up the Aranea request-response model, to allow for easier asynchronous programming as well as localized rendering. This allows for instance to access widgets through JavaScript and render only one widget at a time. This was partially done to support our new TreeWidget, which is an all-AJAX tree view control.

Finally we have a lot of more-or-less innovative improvements that are worked on by both our team and other Webmedia workers. Most of them are done as some kind of University theses and we expect them to be finished around April. You can read about them (briefly) on Jevgeni’s university homepage.

This all is a LOT of work to be done in a little time, which explains the lack of updates on our blog. But expect a lot of good news as well as some unexpected surprises to come up soon.

Migrating our CVS repository to Subversion has been completed. CVS write access is now disabled. CVS repository will remain accessible, but in read-only mode.

Converting CVS repository contents to SVN using cvs2svn script took 2.5 hours. SVN repository is now up and running, so development can continue normally. We also upgraded Changelogic to a newer version, that supports Subversion repositories. Developers will need to grab changelogic-personal.properties file from Changelogic -> Supporting files. Additionally, one of the following lines will need to be inserted to changelogic-personal.properties:

# When using Changelogic remotely, e.g. from your workstation
cl.vcs.repository=svn+ssh://araneaframework.org/var/svnroot

# When using Changelogic on araneaframework.org server
cl.vcs.repository=file:///var/svnroot

The dependencies that previous Changelogic version needed in your $ANT_HOME/lib folder are no longer necessary, you may delete them: apache-bsf.jar, changelogic-ant.jar, commons-httpclient.jar, commons-logging.jar, js.jar.

ViewVC for the new SVN repository will be available on the following URL: http://svn.araneaframework.org/viewvc/. Previous ViewCVS for the old CVS repository remains accessible on the following URL: http://www.araneaframework.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/.
Read-only access to SVN repository for anonymous users will be available on the following URL: http://svn.araneaframework.org/repos/aranea. For example, to check out a copy of the latest Aranea:
svn co http://svn.araneaframework.org/repos/aranea/branches/latest aranea Read-only access to the old CVS repository remains accessible in the same way as before.
Developer access to SVN repository will be available on the following URL: svn+ssh://araneaframework.org/var/svnroot. You will probably want to start with:
svn co svn+ssh://araneaframework.org/var/svnroot/aranea/branches/latest aranea

This release includes bugfixes and AJAX Action API backported from 1.1 branch. See Actions in action (pun intended) in a live AJAX demo included with the distribution (Demos->Advanced->Form With Actions). Also included is an advanced demo for popup management. Feel free to download it now!