Re: [Rife-users] A couple of questions before starting with RIFE
sounds good :) Emmanuel On 12/5/05, Geert Bevin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Geert did mention a book down the line; i for one won't mind contributing a few chapters to that endeavor. Cool Emmanuel, I'll keep that in mind. I postponed the book proposal for a couple of months since I'm swamped with work at the moment and the new-year festivities are coming soon. In January or February I'll resume working on the TOC. I'll ping you then. -- Geert Bevin Uwyn bvba Use what you need Avenue de Scailmont 34 http://www.uwyn.com 7170 Manage, Belgium gbevin[remove] at uwyn dot comTel +32 64 84 80 03 PGP Fingerprint : 4E21 6399 CD9E A384 6619 719A C8F4 D40D 309F D6A9 Public PGP key : available at servers pgp.mit.edu, wwwkeys.pgp.net ___ Rife-users mailing list Rife-users@uwyn.com http://www.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users ___ Rife-users mailing list Rife-users@uwyn.com http://www.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users
Re: [Rife-users] A couple of questions before starting with RIFE
Hi John, 1. If RIFE is really all it appears to be (e.g., a complete answer to the questions Ruby on Rails has posed to the Java community), how come it is not more widely used? It is still a very minor player (whether or not this is justified). I was wondering why this might be. Could it be to do with its Belgian (i.e., non-US) origins? People have said this to me before, but I don't think that's the real reason. Of course any answer to this is pure speculation, but as it turns out I talked about this very issue with Bruce Tate (Beyond Java author) and David Heinemeier Hansson (Rails' creator). This is what Bruce says about it : I push RIFE every other weekend or so, when I do the nofluffjuststuff symposiums. I also pointed big name toward your frameworks. Usually, the biggest fear is that the project wouldn't get too far without you, so they view it as risky. I'd really work hard toward Spring integration, and work on ways to hide that integration from the user. My remark to David: I fear though that not many people doing Java are open for the 'quick results without a headache' approach unless they totally switch over to another language or platform. RIFE walking a middle road doesn't help much for its adoption though, but that's another story ;-) His response: I think that's a very precise analysis. As long as people are in denial of a world outside, Struts will seem like the only way. And a rebel framework like RIFE stand as little chance as Rails. But as soon as they open up, I think they want to distance as much as possible (and thus Rails provide the exact opposite of the Struts in a lot of ways). I personally think that RIFE is in a difficult position for both people coming from Java and people coming from PHP. Those who come from Java are usually tied to the frameworks they already chose and thus very often can't switch to another view on the problem nor another technology stack. If they choose to change, they tend to go for the solutions that already have a large user-base (if 10 people chose it, it can't be bad). Even if they don't get the nicest solution, they at least get one that works well enough and has a pool of knowledge that can be capitalized on. If they choose to change radically, then the memory of the over-zealous complexity of what they already used drives them as far away from Java as they can: RoR. Those who come from PHP are used to a scripting language and know of a lot of the monstrous Java-based setups and their complexity. They don't risk getting close to it and go towards RoR instead. A last part that plays against it is that while RIFE aims to provide as much productivity and development fun as possible, we value maintainability and clarity above that. This means that there is a site-structure as a central point of declaration with the data and logic flow inside it. Several people already told me first hand that when they read the features, they loved what they read, but once they saw the site-structure they remembered the XML declarations of other frameworks and concluded that it was just a variation on the same theme, without looking at what is really done in there. 2. How long do you think it would take a reasonably experienced Java developer, who has worked mainly with the Struts/Spring/ Hibernate approach to web apps, to get comfortable and productive with RIFE's very different way of thinking/working? Depends on what you're doing. RIFE is setup (jumpstart) so that you can start right away without having to plan, configure and setup a whole collection or things before you even try something out. So, getting your first results is almost instantaneous and, as Eddy says, within a day you'll have something going. The next stage is a bit more difficult though, since RIFE does a number of things totally differently from what you already know: no servlet-side sessions, logicless templates, declaration of data-flow, url == state, ... I have never been in the situation of having to learn that (since I designed the features), but most people just need time to get the aha! feeling. Once they've switched to the mindset we rarely get any questions, except for bugs, holes in the documentation, missing features or complex aspects of the framework. 3. Are there any tips anyone could give me about how to start 'thinking in RIFE'? I.e., how to approach the design of a web application with RIFE in mind. Perhaps something along the lines of planning it as a flow diagram, thinking of possible exits from each page view? Some things have helped people lately: * the URL drives a RIFE application: URL == state * the templates don't drive the pages: they are logicless blueprints When I begin with a new app, I start from the jumpstart and write a simple version of my domain model first. I add RIFE/Crud to get an instant admin interface to be
Re: [Rife-users] A couple of questions before starting with RIFE
1. If RIFE is really all it appears to be (e.g., a complete answer to the questions Ruby on Rails has posed to the Java community), how come it is not more widely used? It is still a very minor player (whether or not this is justified). I was wondering why this might be. Could it be to do with its Belgian (i.e., non-US) origins? I just wanted to add to this that RIFE never was and still is not intended to be a RoR-clone for Java. We have been working on the framework for almost 4 years now and only recently prepped RIFE/Crud for public release after having used it a long time internally. We have our own ideals and ideas. Some go intro the same direction as RoR, but many are also the opposite. It just happens that RoR took the community by a storm and that people compare RIFE with it. Personally I think that the best thing in RoR is Ruby, I don't like the framework itself very much. Since a wealth of JVM scripting languages are supported in RIFE (like Groovy), you can get much of agility that scripting languages give you. -- Geert Bevin Uwyn bvba Use what you need Avenue de Scailmont 34 http://www.uwyn.com 7170 Manage, Belgium gbevin[remove] at uwyn dot comTel +32 64 84 80 03 PGP Fingerprint : 4E21 6399 CD9E A384 6619 719A C8F4 D40D 309F D6A9 Public PGP key : available at servers pgp.mit.edu, wwwkeys.pgp.net ___ Rife-users mailing list Rife-users@uwyn.com http://www.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users
Re: [Rife-users] A couple of questions before starting with RIFE
Let me just add that, once you know java, the learning curve is not that steep; it took me about 2 weeks of on/off playing around with the framework to finally get it. My personal path was: 1. I read and understood the basic building blocks for templates... value(v), block (B, BV), include (I) [ http://rifers.org/wiki/display/RIFE/GuideTemplates ] 2. I followed the in-depth simple blog video, which iteratively introduces most of the key features of rife, essential for app development. [ http://rifers.org/rife_indepth_simple_blog ] After that, I started to move this about, get into the code to understand what's going on for some of the parts (especially with Authentication), asked questions on the list (it's a great community here, and one of the things that got me to get this far into the framework), search the wiki (http://rifers.org/wiki/display/RIFE/Home) and most of it finally makes sense now. Apart from a few extensions you have to make of the Rife classes to take advantage of some Rife features, such as Rife's validation implementations, the framework assumes very little about your code. And if I've not mentioned it yet, the feature I'm loving the most now is Rife's out-of-container testing ( http://rifers.org/wiki/display/RIFE/Out+of+container+testing ); just sweet! :) -- eokyere On 12/5/05, Geert Bevin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: 1. If RIFE is really all it appears to be (e.g., a complete answer to the questions Ruby on Rails has posed to the Java community), how come it is not more widely used? It is still a very minor player (whether or not this is justified). I was wondering why this might be. Could it be to do with its Belgian (i.e., non-US) origins? I just wanted to add to this that RIFE never was and still is not intended to be a RoR-clone for Java. We have been working on the framework for almost 4 years now and only recently prepped RIFE/Crud for public release after having used it a long time internally. We have our own ideals and ideas. Some go intro the same direction as RoR, but many are also the opposite. It just happens that RoR took the community by a storm and that people compare RIFE with it. Personally I think that the best thing in RoR is Ruby, I don't like the framework itself very much. Since a wealth of JVM scripting languages are supported in RIFE (like Groovy), you can get much of agility that scripting languages give you. -- Geert Bevin Uwyn bvba Use what you need Avenue de Scailmont 34 http://www.uwyn.com 7170 Manage, Belgium gbevin[remove] at uwyn dot comTel +32 64 84 80 03 PGP Fingerprint : 4E21 6399 CD9E A384 6619 719A C8F4 D40D 309F D6A9 Public PGP key : available at servers pgp.mit.edu, wwwkeys.pgp.net ___ Rife-users mailing list Rife-users@uwyn.com http://www.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users ___ Rife-users mailing list Rife-users@uwyn.com http://www.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users
Re: [Rife-users] A couple of questions before starting with RIFE
Thanks a lot Emmanuel, it's nice to hear how someone got into using RIFE from scratch. Apart from a few extensions you have to make of the Rife classes to take advantage of some Rife features, such as Rife's validation implementations, the framework assumes very little about your code. I still think that this needs to be better and I'll start working on it after the next release (which should be this week, right before JavaPolis), according to the discussion we had about true POJO support (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.java.rife.user/1245). And if I've not mentioned it yet, the feature I'm loving the most now is Rife's out-of-container testing ( http://rifers.org/wiki/display/RIFE/Out+of+container+testing ); just sweet! :) Yeah, after having added that I had the same feeling. I really feels nice once you start working with it. -- Geert Bevin Uwyn bvba Use what you need Avenue de Scailmont 34 http://www.uwyn.com 7170 Manage, Belgium gbevin[remove] at uwyn dot comTel +32 64 84 80 03 PGP Fingerprint : 4E21 6399 CD9E A384 6619 719A C8F4 D40D 309F D6A9 Public PGP key : available at servers pgp.mit.edu, wwwkeys.pgp.net ___ Rife-users mailing list Rife-users@uwyn.com http://www.uwyn.com/mailman/listinfo/rife-users
