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Aranea framework is an Open Source (APL 2.0) Java Hierarchical Model-View-Controller web framework that was developed by Estonian company Webmedia. Aranea provides a common simple approach to building the web application components, reusing custom or general GUI logic and extending the framework. The framework enforces programming using object-oriented techniques with POJOs and provides a JSP tag library that facilitates programming web GUIs without writing HTML.

Notable features of Aranea include:

• Component orientation. In Aranea everything is a component and everything is reusable. The framework itself is assembled from a number of components with specific responsibilities and programmer also writes the code in terms of components. The components have very simple interface which has about 4-6 methods. Framework includes many pre-built components like forms with data binding capabilities and database-backed lists.

• Event driven. Programming model is based on components reacting to events generated by the user. One typically doesn't have to deal with request or determine what button was pressed since the event handler just calls the appropriate listener or method.

• Using POJOs. The components in Aranea are pure Java objects supporting polymorphism, inheritance and encapsulation.

• Explicit state management. Aranea component fields are persistent and framework will automatically determine component lifecycle without limiting to any scopes.

• View agnostic. The framework is completely view technology independent but provides a thorough library of custom JSP tags that target building GUIs without writing HTML.

• Integration platform. Allows assembling most of available web programming models out of reusable components and patterns.

• Powerful navigation. Aranea out-of-the-box supports the so called flows and flow nesting, which allows to create nested processes that preserve the previous process state and restore it when finished.

External links

• Aranea Framework
  • Aranea reference manual (as HTML)
  • Aranea Technical Paper (PDF)
  • Aranea tutorial (HTML)
  • Conceptual "Hello world" (HTML)