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With less code, Ariba says it can build richer apps


By Jeff Feinman
February 19, 2009 — 
It might have been 10 years in the making, but business management software company Ariba has released an open-source Web application development framework that attempts to build richer applications with less code.

AribaWeb, released today, was an internal user interface framework that the company has used since 1999. AribaWeb is now available under an Apache license.

“Ariba has been a big beneficiary of open source throughout the history of the company,” said Craig Federighi, Ariba’s UI technology evangelist. “We use all sorts of different open-source infrastructure in our own commercial software, and we felt we had an opportunity to give back something very meaningful to the open-source community.”

AribaWeb is written in Java and can work with applications written in Groovy or Java. Federighi compared AribaWeb to Web application frameworks like JSF (JavaServer Faces), Ruby on Rails and Apache Struts. He claimed that AribaWeb enables building richer applications with much less code than other frameworks, an ability that comes from automatic AJAX UI features and technology for instantly creating applications.

AribaWeb’s Auto AJAX enables the production of AJAX UIs without any client-side scripting, whereas most frameworks require developers to write JavaScript in order to have AJAX behavior, Federighi said.

Instant App, another AribaWeb feature, is a model-driven UI capability that can take business objects and create interfaces around them, allowing developers to search and edit those objects. This feature eliminates the need for code to maintain UI screens within business applications. With a set of Groovy or Java domain classes, Instant App can apply rules to available metadata to create an application with no user interface code.

Additionally, a feature called Live Edit lets developers use drag-and-drop capabilities to edit applications while they’re running.

“When we compare the amount of code required to build an app with this technology compared to something like Ruby on Rails, which is normally considered a very productive environment, AribaWeb takes between 10 to 100 times less code,” Federighi claimed.

“If you look at why people started maybe thinking about using Rails instead of PHP, which was better known at the time, they chose it because it gave them higher productivity and they could build more of what they wanted and ultimately end up with a better app.”

Ariba was founded in Sunnyvale, Calif., in 1996, and primarily focuses on spend management software, which helps companies understand their corporate spending. Different versions of the company’s business management products enable small to large enterprise organizations to control spending, reduce paperwork, lower prices and take other cost-cutting measures in both hosted and on-demand models. The publicly traded company has US$328 million in annual revenue.


Related Search Term(s): Ariba, Java, open source, RIA


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