In a debate with advocates of various Web frameworks, such as JSF, Spring MVC, Ruby on Rails...and Rife ( Rife?????), happened at The Server Side Java Symposium, on last Friday, march 28th, discussed about which Java Web Framework is the best. Common news, no??
Right, Sure. But, for me, surprising appeared one name... which? Rife.
RIFE is a full-stack, open-source Java web application framework, offering fast results with the promise of maintainability and code clarity. Development becomes productive, consistent and reusable.
Differences
Here are some differences from other Java Web Frameworks.
- You get 90% of the features with 10% of the usual effort, thanks to its full stack;
- Logic-less HTML templates that can be previewed in any browser and edited with standard tools;
- Uniform component model, designed from the ground up for reusability: applications, sub-sites, pages, porlets, widgets, ... can be easily packaged and placed in any other context;
- Integrated native Java web continuations and flow continuations;
- Metaprogramming, driven by your domain model, but without polluting it;
- Flexible declaration and configuration with support for plain Java as well as XML;
- Core support for web data flow as well as page logic flow;
- Integrates with existing solutions such as Spring and standard JDBC datasources;
- Multi-dimensional conversational state management with scoping;
- Language-independent template engine with support for XHTML, HTML, XML, Text, SQL, Java;
- Persistence layer with content management integration and versioning;
- Designed for the creation of consistent maintainable applications as well as on quick delivery;
- Embraces standard protocols and specifications, providing larger building blocks by wrapping lower layers with high-level functionalities;
- Out-of-container testing with full introspection capabilities of the executed flow and components;
- Lightweight execution model that has been proven in production;
- Built for Java 5 with intelligent downgraded support for Java 4, and
- Designed for developer comfort: minimal application restarts thanks to automatic detection of file modifications.
Features
I tried to pass the features of Rife, and some explanation about each one.
Web application engine
RIFE's web engine provides you with a solution that values maintainability above everything else, but without compromising on productivity.
Integrated web continuations
Continuations are constructs that are inspired from Scheme.
IoC support
RIFE focuses on the retrieval of the references and the injection of objects into the web engine elements.
Out of container testing (Nice! )
RIFE web applications can be fully tested outside of a servlet container.
Content management framework
RIFE provides a Content Management Framework that is geared towards the process of storing, loading, validating, formatting, transforming, versioning, retrieving and streaming of various content types.
Bidirectional multi-format template engine
Many template engines start out with a desire to separate presentation from logic.
Template content transformation
The content of each template can be transformed at instantiation.
Centralized meta-data facility
The main purpose of constraints is to alter the default behavior of a data type and to clearly set the accepted limits and behavioral directions.
Authentication framework
RIFE provides its own framework for the authentication of web applications.
JDBC abstraction layer
Using raw JDBC directly requires a lot of discipline and boilerplate code.
Database query builders
RIFE has a layered approach to database interaction and persistence.
Persistence layer
The JDBC abstraction layer and database query builders offer everything to create a generic database persistence engine.
Configuration framework
The configuration of your applications can be isolated into dedicated XML files.
Central application life-cycle management
Each application is a collection of optionally dependent participants that are responsible for initializing and cleaning up the required context and features.
Cron-like scheduler
RIFE provides an asynchronous scheduler as an application participant that can be set up to run tasks at specific moments.
Asynchronous mail queue
Sending mails in real-time can become a huge bottleneck in popular web sites.
Content syndication framework
RSS 2.0 and Atom 0.3 are natively supported and can be generated in real-time.
Resource abstraction
Retrieving and writing resources is completely abstracted.
Web services
RIFE provides support for SOAP and Hessian web-services through the integration of 3rd party libraries.
Integration
RIFE integrates and supports a variety of back-end libraries, frameworks and tools.
Databases | Scripting languages | Servlet containers |
Image readers and convertors | ClusteringWeb services | FrameworksMessaging |
Examples
You can See some examples, here.
Open-Source Concept ( COOLLL!!)
Like an open-source project works, Rife has a Rive Live Guide as a RIFE Users Guide, where the people can write.
So, Wake up and keep watch this framework and collaborate. :)
