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.