Rife with automatic CRUD scaffolding worth looking at

I have been looking at Rife (a component based Java server side framework) for a while, but have not invested the time to do anything other than read though tutorial examples.

Rifers.org has released an automatic CRUD scaffolding framework that at least on the surface is a little like Ruby Rails scaffolding. You can read about it here.

Rife CRUD scaffolding customization does not look nearly as flexible as Ruby Rails scaffolding, but that is fair: Rife does its scaffolding at runtime so there is no code to tweak - different than Ruby Rails where you can edit the generated .rhtml, Ruby controller, etc. files.

I like the superb runtime performance of simple JSPs (with custom tag libraries) but there is no reason to believe that the runtime overhead of Rife and Rife CRUD scaffolding would be too bad -- servers are cheaper than programmers (usually, except for very large scale deployments) so the agile nature of Rife looks good. I am hoping to have time to download Rife CRUD later today or tonight to kick the tires.

PS. I just took the time to download the calendar example - looked through the source + configuration and ran the example. I did *not* take the time to write my own example from scratch. Anyway, Rife + CRUD scaffolding looks cool, but I think that I will stick with Ruby Rails and for Java development: plain old JSPs and custom tag libraries (mostly).

PSS. Geert posted a response to this blog in which he points out that the generated code is compiled on the fly so there is no performance penalty and that the ability to customize CRUD scaffolding is more flexible than I thought.

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