How about you, Geert? Which frameworks have you tried and what were
your impressions? Also, which frameworks were you working with before
you decided to create RIFE? What prompted you to embark on this endeavor?

I started working on RIFE more than 5 years ago. At that point in time there wasn't really much out there. I know that during the development, Tapestry was announced and I saw a lot of the others come and go along the years. I still remember Spring being announced and me feeling very depressed about it, until I realized the focus was totally different ;-)

This version of RIFE is actually the third take on the matter. Beforehand I learned a lot about what was needed in a web framework by having written a full-stack one in PHP as a consultant for a company. We wrote some big sites with it (~60k loc), which made me see its shortcomings. In 1998 I moved on as a full-time employee to a company that mainly did Java, which is where I learned the language (still at version 1.0 or 1.1 then). I began writing a new framework for them, in Java, where I mostly designed the templating approach and the database layer. At that time it even went further and contained a somewhat functional in-memory database for standalone apps. I left there at the end of 1999 and started doing independent contracting again. Since I couldn't use any of the framework code I wrote due to licensing issues, I decided to rewrite it once more from scratch, this time really taking the time to design the web engine in a componentized fashion with flow handling. That when the current version of the framework was born, initially called Matchbox and then renamed RIFE.

Recently I've been looking quite a bit at Wicket and like many of the things I see there. I've played around with WebWork also. Besides that I haven't really tried out much since it's already hard to find the time required to work on RIFE. I do try to keep my eyes open for important new things that arrive.

If others have experiences, thoughts and reactions about trying out
different frameworks, it would be interesting to read about them.

Yes, definitely, that would be most interesting to read about!

--
Geert Bevin
Uwyn "Use what you need" - http://uwyn.com
RIFE Java application framework - http://rifers.org
Music and words - http://gbevin.com


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