> I'd be very interested to get your view on why you prefer to stick > with RIFE after having tried out all these others. Particularly in > the light of some comparison evaluations that will be performed by a > large company next week.
FWIW, I've also tried Tapestry, Wicket, WebWork, JSF, Stripes, Echo2, SpringMVC and Millstone. Here are some thoughts; I'll try to keep this brief, feel free to ask for more information on any specific topic. After RIFE, my favorites are WebWork, Tapestry and Stripes. I did not like working with the others. I dropped Echo2 and Millstone because I found they were doing too much for you in terms of rendering. Nice ideas, but I still like to have control over the HTML. Also, it's too much API to learn. SpringMVC's verboseness and presence of HttpServlet* in method signatures turned me away. Also, why all those controllers? (Note: this has nothing to do with Spring's core, which I find very useful.) As for JSF, perhaps I didn't give it enough attention but it just seemed like it was doing too much for you also (frameworks should get out of your way, not in your way), and did you see how much documentation you have to read?! Just too complicated and heavyweight for my taste. Now for the more positive: Stripes is quite nice for its simplicity. Its author is very pragmatic and it shows in his framework. However I felt there was something missing.. I can't quite put my finger on it. I had used XWork before and I liked its integration with WebWork. Also, WebWork has nice features: Spring integration, validation, interceptors, etc. I also like how wiring is done. I started building an app but when I got into complex stuff, I just couldn't get the custom tags to do what I wanted. Again the problem with custom tags. I used Tapestry in a major project and it went really well. I did not find the learning curve to be as bad as it sounds. However in Tap 4.0 you *have* to use HiveMind and I find its also become too heavyweight. Also, it locks you in quite strongly. RIFE, on the other hand, makes it easier to decouple parts of your application. Another problem with Tapestry is that I find there are too many *tricks*. RIFE is my favorite because of.. many reasons, but to name just 2: 1. The templating. It's so Keep It Simple and Smart. There are only 4 tags to learn: B, V, BV, and I. For me that's the best part. No more having to remember tons of tags with tons more of attributes. Having to keep refering to the docs to look up attributes, what values they expect, etc. is a pain. Plus, tags tend to try to do too much for you. It all gets too complicated. Here RIFE shines by making simple things simple and complex things possible since all the logic is in Java code. 2. The modular approach. The way you build elements and wire them together is very well done. How easy it was to build that simple Table, er, "unit"? ( not 'component' ;-) ) is an example. The things that RIFE users come up with is a testament to how the framework gives you what you need to build things, without getting in the way of your creativity. OK one last thing, Geert is an awesome person and the RIFE community is extremely responsive and helpful. Not to be taken for granted! Hope this helps. Feel free to ask for any more precisions concerning the frameworks I mentioned. Frederic _______________________________________________ Rife-users mailing list Rife-users@uwyn.com http://lists.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users
