RIFE and WebWork, together
With the release of WebWork 2.2 beta 2 today, we are happy to report the first collaboration effort between the RIFE team and the WebWork team. As some of you may already know, RIFE is an excellent development stack and is greatly admired by the entire WebWork team. One of the really great features in RIFE is its support for Continuations. Realizing that this could be a feature that other frameworks (especially those like RIFE, WebWork, Spring MVC, Struts, etc) could use, Geert, the RIFE lead, and I spent the last few days extracing the RIFE continuations code from the rest of RIFE.
The result is a new RIFE sub-project called RIFE/continuations. WebWork now includes an early version of this project and provides experimental support for continuations. While we won't be recommending anyone use them in production just yet, we wanted to add them as an optional element in version 2.2 to demonstrate a few things:
- We are committed to working with the Java community, not competing with them
- We want to get new features out as quickly as possible so users can play with them and give us feedback (this is why it is made optional and turned off by default, but still made available soon as possible)
- Through both Continuations and web page flows (Spring Web Flow and Beehive), the WebWork team is dedicated to making sure complex page flows/wizards are easy to do
We expect to continue to work with the RIFE team where it makes sense, cooperating instead of competing. Likewise, we have another development where we are working closely with another very popular Java framework... more on that in the next post.