About

Aria is first and foremost a platform for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA). RIAs are a sort of melding of the desktop and the web, blurring the boundaries in terms of functionality and adding usability and functionality. By providing a richer user experience and a more powerful working environment RIAs aim to empower the end user and make applications more useful.

Aria also aims to make the process of building RIAs easier by taking care of the low level plumbing involved in building feature rich applications. Aria provides support for assembling user interfaces from declarative XML and combining this with data via declarative data bindings. The declarative nature of Aria cuts down on the amount of coding needed to build applications. Aria also promotes a clean organization of code so that stuff like business logic can be separated from the workings of the UI itself, and this normally pays great dividends when it comes to maintenance.

The Aria project also provides tooling for both Eclipse and NetBeans to allow graphical assembly of the UI and other application components for added productivity and visual fidelity or simply for those who are not so keen on messing with XML.

Aria is aimed largely at business applications where RIAs can add value, rather than one of web pages or infrequently used application. For business applications, repeated or even frequent use can benefit greatly from the performance improvements of a RIA based environment. Java can also add greatly with the vast array of libraries and legacy systems that can be integrated for further productivity gain.

To further enable the creation of business applications, the Aria framework includes facilities (both at runtime and design time) to automatically generate and manage UIs for popular backends such as Spring and Hibernate, so much so that much of the UI needed for these systems can be generated automatically. One goal of Aria 4.0 is to further automate this process so that complete applications/UIs can be managed and generated in this way with minimal developer intervention.

Finally, Aria is a community based project and you are invited to become involved and contribute to the growth of the project. To become involved just get in touch via e-mail