Paul Krill
Editor at Large

AngularBeans brings together Angular and Java for Web dev

news
May 3, 20162 mins

AngularBeans 2 will accommodate Angular's own next-generation upgrade and add container support

AngularBeans, a Web framework tying the AngularJS JavaScript framework to enterprise Java, will move forward with accommodations for the planned AngularJS 2 framework and multiple containers.

Begun in January 2015, AngularBeans allows developers to use Google’s AngularJS for front-end Web development with Java EE on the back end. The developer of AngularBeans, Bessem Hmidi, sees the project filling a need in the Java space for an alternative to JavaServer Faces Web UI technology, which has been around for more than a decade.

According to Hmidi, Angular is the leading JavaScript single-page application framework, while Java EE 7 offers a lot of enterprise-level services but its presentation layer standard, JSF, is inadequate. Using Angular on the front end helps by including more state-ful clients and making stateless servers easier to scale. Servers use fewer resources to interact with browsers.

Offering an abstraction level equal to or superior to that of the JSF Primefaces front-end framework, AngularBeans uses a single-page application approach, said Hmidi. “AngularBeans can be compared to Spring MVC plus Spring WebSocket frameworks [but] not Spring itself.”

AngularBeans leverages CDI (Contexts and Dependency Injection) and also supports SockJS WebSocket emulation as well as a real-time event-driven publish-and-subscribe broadcasting system and event-driven file uploads. It handles HTTP methods calls and offers detailed control over server- and client-side data updates, according to documentation.

The current stable release of AngularBeans is 1.0.2. Version 2, expected to be released in coming months, will run with both the existing Angular 1.x release as well as the upcoming Angular 2 upgrade, a rewrite of the framework featuring faster rendering and supporting multiple renderers. It will also work in any container, including the Spring Framework.

Paul Krill

Paul Krill is editor at large at InfoWorld. Paul has been covering computer technology as a news and feature reporter for more than 35 years, including 30 years at InfoWorld. He has specialized in coverage of software development tools and technologies since the 1990s, and he continues to lead InfoWorld’s news coverage of software development platforms including Java and .NET and programming languages including JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, Python, Ruby, Rust, and Go. Long trusted as a reporter who prioritizes accuracy, integrity, and the best interests of readers, Paul is sought out by technology companies and industry organizations who want to reach InfoWorld’s audience of software developers and other information technology professionals. Paul has won a “Best Technology News Coverage” award from IDG.

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