The Guide Layout is a powerful and flexible layout that provides for a more natural way of designing and laying out forms. In Aria 4.0 the guide layout is undergoing so enhancement and one of these enhancements: the display of guides at runtime, is designed to make it easier to code and debug the layout at runtime.

Being able to clearly see the guides makes tweaking them easy :-)

Layering of pages has been added in Aria 4.0 and each page is now by default layered. Layering provides for multiple transparent containers within the page space. Layers can be shown, hidden, locked and moved in z-order both at design time and in the finished application.

Click on the image to jump to a screencast of page layering within Aria's NetBeans editor plugin.

The table below lists the changes and enhancements made in Aria 4.0. The table will be updated until the final release of Aria 4.0 is made public.

Commons Validations has long been a popular package for validation in the Spring and Struts world, and now it is available in th Aria framework.

Aria has its own lightweight validation and though it is extensible, there have been few user conributions to help flesh out the validator range. Commons on the other hand as a much broader set of validations available, so leveraging this framework was an obvious choice. The downside however, is that commons brings with it some dependancies and this makes it quite heavy for what it does.

The integration of commens therefore has been by way of a separate project/jar so that it can be included optionally. In addition the integration includes support for the latest POJO features and can be easily enabled by adding the following to the validation declarations

The MetroBank example is intended to showcase some of the more advanced and newer features of Aria and in particular the Spring and POJO integration.

The sample comprises an Aria swing client application which communicates with a Spring backend. The Spring backend which persists data to a HSQLDB database via JPA exposes POJOs to the client by way of annotations that cause DTO objects to automatically generated on demand for the client. These POJOs are then rendered in templates on the client side complete with automatically data bindings and validations.

Several major enhancements have been made in this snapshow, including a major revision of the styles handling and further enhancement of the POJO handling.

PojoPanels can now be nested within dialogs using Aria's PojoDialog class. For example:>/p>

EditAccountDetails accDetailsDialog = (EditAccountDetails)PojoDialog.createDialog(
    EditAccountDetails.class,
    PojoDialog.READ_ACTION, 
    "pojo/currentAccountDTO", 
    "Account details" );

accDetailsDialog.setLogo( "hands.gif" );
accDetailsDialog.setViewFile( "views/accounts" );
accDetailsDialog.showDialog( this );

int status = Dialog.getLastReturnValue();
if ( status == Dialog.OK_CLICKED ) { 
  ...
}

The view file is a collection of presentation attributes. Using a view allows the same POJOs to be presented in different ways for, say, different users or different situations.

Create a dialog from the Generic PojoDialog

The above creates a dialog for the pojo, nesting a panel within the dialog and providing some basic CRUD operation support. The dialog uses a PojoDialogTemplate.xml file so that the appearance of the dialog can be fine tuned for individual applications.

A significant bug in the handling of styles has been fixed. The bug prevented styles being applied to generic component instances.

The idea of the styles was to support CSS like styles and a style for a class such as Button or Label could be created and applied to any instances of these components that did not explicitly specify a style. This is now fixed.

The components in the Aria framework inherited the XUI design, which makes them a bit non standard. Starting with v4.0 Aria will resolve this problem by dropping the AttributedComponent interface in favour of the normal beans API.