Aranea—Web Framework Construction and Integration Kit Oleg Murk¨ Jevgeni Kabanov Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Dept. of Computer Science, Chalmers University of Technology, University of Tartu, SE-412 96 Goteborg,¨ Sweden J. Liivi 2, EE-50409 Tartu, Estonia
[email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT proaches and ideas are tried out. Indeed, many very good Currently there exist dozens of web controller frameworks ideas have been proposed during these years, many of which that are incompatible, but at the same time have large por- we will describe later in this paper. On a longer time- tions of overlapping functionality that is implemented over scale the stronger (or better marketed) frameworks and ap- and over again. Web programmers are facing limitations on proaches will survive, the weaker will diminish. However, in code reuse, application and framework integration, extensi- our opinion, such situation also has a lot of disadvantages. bility, expressiveness of programming model and productiv- 1.1 Problem Description ity. In this paper we propose a minimalistic component model First of all let’s consider the problems of the web frame- Aranea that is aimed at constructing and integrating server- work ecosystem from the viewpoint of application develop- side web controller frameworks in Java. It allows assembling ment. Framework user population is very fragmented as a most of available web programming models out of reusable result of having many incompatible frameworks with simi- components and patterns. We also show how to integrate lar programming models. Each company or even project, is different existing frameworks using Aranea as a common using a different web framework, which requires learning a protocol.