Atif Khan’s Blog

I wrote a blog entry in April 2007 about RIFE. It has been 2 years since I wrote that entry. I had mentioned that RIFE was lacking in documention and the learning curve was pretty steeep. That was one of the resons why I decided not to investigate further. Geert tried to calrify some of the questions I had, but that didn’t really remove all the doubts I had. I know that Geert has moved on to bigger and better things. The framework seems to be dead now as there hasn’t been any new releases since 2007. This goes to show that with too much complexity, it is very difficult to build a community that can sustain the project beyond the original founders. It was a framework built on some very good concepts and I am sad to see it go. I do see some nightly snapshots, but no new releases. Is RIFE really dead?

I have been spending time on and off looking at various web frameworks available for a little more than a year. A lot of this has to do with keeping track of what’s going on in the web framework arena and keep in sync with the technologies. Another focus of mine is to see how the new (at least for me) frameworks affect the productivity of a developer.

I first looked at RIFE last year and I have been very impressed by the concepts.The developers of RIFE, Geert Bevin and others have been very helpful when I had some questions. I was even able to get answers on the IRC channel for RIFE. It was not until recently that I tried to write an application using RIFE that I really got a feel of it.

Pros

• A complete framework. It includes basic web framework, ORM, Content Management, Validations, Templates etc.
• Good support from developers
• A nice quick start application to get you running quickly
• Good support for constraints for adding validations
• Continuations - ability to pause, rewind, jump through transaction steps

Cons

• Templates are really weird to work with. The syntax for the templates really did me. It is not really designer friendly like Tapestry or Wicket
• The concept of flowlink and datalink is just too verbose and not clear
• Using annotation didn’t do me any good as well for defining the flow and data links. There isn’t enough documentation for annotations
• The only way for form validations I could find was to define the a MetaData class equivalent to the domain object representing the form and define the validations in there. This just seems like way too much of work for simple validations.
• I could not figure out how to customize the error messages for form validations

In the end, I feel that it’s the lack of documentation that prevented me from really exploring it. I know Geert is a very sharp guy and if he ever gets to read my blog, I welcome his comments. I think the learning curve is too much for RIFE and lack of documentation adds to it and I am not sure if the return is proportional to the effort compared to other frameworks.