You are hereAria 4.0, Development Snapshot 2: What's New
Aria 4.0, Development Snapshot 2: What's New
Several major enhancements have been made in this snapshow, including a major revision of the styles handling and further enhancement of the POJO handling.
Styles
In the case of styles the handling of attributes and properties has been completely revised to remove the special interfaces needed for setting component properties. Now Aria uses the normal Java bean interfaces and this means not only that third party components can be more easily employed in Aria applications, but also that Aria's components are themselves normal Java beans and thus they can be used outside of the context of Aria.
The style handling also integrates with the UIManager. In the past setting styles on components such as buttons was only partially successful as the UIManager would tend to over write these styles during the life of the application. The revision of styles handling also fixed some bugs that defeated the CSS like style classes. With the resolution of these bugs styles can be defined for classes of components and therefore the style declarations do not need to be provided for every instance of those components. Earlier revisions to the styles and property handling also mean that just about any bean property can be set via the styles. So while the syntax is somewhat different to CSS and the complete range of CSS selectors is not available the capability of the styles handling should approach that of CSS more closely.
Pojos
At first blush the handling of Pojos in this latest snapshot is not significantly different from the previous snapshot, but digging a little deeper you should see it is more capable and easier to use.
Firstly the backend support now includes automatic Data Transfer Object (DTO) generation from the domain objects. This DTO generation can be controlled so that either deep copies can be made or else the object model can be flattens by replacing object references with their IDs.
Coupled to this DTO generation is the PojoPanel's ability to dynamically load and render Pojos. Added to this is the new PojoDialog which offers similar functionality in a Dialog. The new support makes it very easy to define a template for rendering Pojos and just point Aria at a model node to have it rendered. In addition Aria will pick up a view file that defines how the rendering takes place.
Is the Pojo handling complete? No - while certain additional capabilities such as error handling, error badges, CRUD operations and validations are available these have not been demonstrated and still require some enhancement. In particular the validations mechanism needs extensive reworking to bring it up to industry standard and better integrate it with the automation of pojos. Expect that in the next snapshot.
MetroBank demo
The MetroBank demo has been enhanced to demonstrate the additional features of Aria, but it is still a bit bare. All of the main components are there but the new features are not shown to their maximum. Once some CRUD operations are in place the demo will be more complete and some of the more glitzy features that are sitting in the code will be enabled to give the full effect.
Check out the separate articles on
Source code
As before the source code is available in SVN, however this snapshot also has a copy of the source code bundled as a zip file for you convenience. Build instructions are included in the Aria Wiki.
Editors, other features and schedules
The editor plug-ins remain unchanged and are therefore not included in this snapshot. The next snapshot should see the core code updates complete and focus will then shift to the editors.
The core functionality is now nearly complete and is relatively stable, most of the development is centered on ease of use and on demonstrating the new features, so a full release is in sight. While I cannot give a firm date for this it should be before year end. In the mean time the code is usable and I'd encourage you to try it out :-)