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!
JavaPolis is almost over and the Aranea team has had a great time! Thanks to all who came to listen to our talk or came up to us in the booth, it was really great to see your interest and to help you out. Thanks a lot to Stephan and the organizers for a great job and we are looking forward to the next time we can met everyone in Antwerp!
In other news we announced integration with Struts, JSF and GWT during the conference and in the next couple of weeks we will setup the subprojects and make them available for testing. The stable releases are expected during January-February, so stay tuned for updates.
Everyone who will be at JavaPolis 2006 in Antwerp, Belgium from Tuesday, 12th to Friday, 15th December is very welcome to attend both the talk on “Object-Oriented Web Development with Aranea” and visit the booth that we share with ChangeLogic configuration management guys. We will have two of the core Aranea developers on place, so if you have any questions, troubles, comments and offers of help we will be more than glad to hear you out (and help if needed).
Another maintenance release from Aranea 1.0 series. See changelog for details.
We also have first changes integrated into our upcoming 1.1 branch, and hope to present some nice surprises before christmas season.