RIA News Desk

Ariba has announced the open source release of AribaWeb, the company's framework for development of RIAs.

AribaWeb enables the creation of rich, highly interactive business applications. Among the key attributes that set AribaWeb apart:

Auto AJAX
"Today's users demand a highly interactive, rich user experience from their web applications. And to date, this challenge has been met primarily through AJAX," said Craig Federighi, User Interface Technology Evangelist at Ariba. "But implementing AJAX typically involves the extensive (and expensive) hand-coding of brittle client-side JavaScript code. With its Auto AJAX technology, AribaWeb completely changes the game and dramatically alters the cost equation - AJAX user interfaces are produced automatically, without requiring the application developer to perform any client-side scripting."

Instant App
Business applications typically consist of hundreds of user interface screens built to support the creation, editing, search and inspection of the business objects that encode the business functionality. In most frameworks, the user interface developer must create and maintain user interface code for each of these screens. AribaWeb's Instant App technology eliminates the need for this code. In fact, given only a set of UI-agnostic Java or Groovy domain classes, AribaWeb can apply rules to the available meta-data and instantly derive a fully functional application, all without a single line of application UI code.

Live Edit and X-Ray
AribaWeb's focus on developer productivity is further evidenced through its Live Edit and X-Ray capabilities. Developers use X-Ray to see through running application UIs, getting visibility to the active hierarchy of components behind the scenes. Further, with Live Edit, developers can use drag and drop to alter the UI layout and property sheets to tweak rules right in the browser. All changes take immediate effect in the live application.

Proven Full Stack
The AribaWeb distribution provides a full stack for the development of database-based business applications, including a deep library of UI widgets (forms, pivot tables, charts, rich text editors, etc.), as well as bindings to a bundled Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) database framework. It also supports deployment in a variety of J2EE environments. And AribaWeb is industry-proven technology. Now in its fifth major release, AribaWeb has been included by Ariba as a critical component of its market-leading spend management and network solutions for nearly a decade. AribaWeb is used daily by millions of users at more than a thousand of the world's largest companies, and has been part of over one trillion dollars of business-to-business electronic commerce.