Hi everyone,
I'm not sure at all who's still active in the server-side web development world or who's even still getting these emails, but it seemed best to reach out through the old mailing lists in case some people are interested in reviving RIFE.
I've personally been busy with a lot of other projects during the last 7 years, ranging for high-performance clustered data tools to real-time musical instruments.
I'm now working at ZeroTurnaround on the LiveRebel product and am being confronted with the state of web development nowadays. To my surprise, in many ways the approaches in RIFE are still relevant and even the Play framework is lacking quite a lot of RIFE's simplicity and power.
So, a few months ago I started work to analyze what I want to keep from RIFE version 1 to build a fresh version 2:
https://github.com/gbevin/rife. I took a little break to work on another quick pet-project in the meantime (
http://uwyn.com/geco/) but that's now all ready for launch.
The idea is to basically put a lot of things in question about RIFE and trim it down, throw away a lot of the junk that was accumulated and make the features very opinionated and targeted.
My initial plan of action is this:
* focus on pure Java and byte-code instrumentation, no scripting languages
* leverage the upcoming features of Java 8
* rebuild the template engine with largely the same ideas in place, but clearer and more focused
* properly finish the isolation of the continuations engine and bring it up to date
* rethink the infrastructure with IoC as a starting point, instead of having it as an afterthought
* totally rewrite the web engine, with similar principles but much more conventions and less configuration
* trim out the database abstraction layer for only certain relevant databases
I've started mocking up the new version of the template engine and took an initial stab at creating an Antlr 4 grammar. That sadly is really not working out so I've started work on a new custom parser.
One of my mistakes with RIFE v1 was that I didn't involve the community much during the development process, so I want to change that.
If you're interested in shaping what RIFE version 2 is going to become, please hop on the developers mailing list and say hi:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rife-dev
Hope to hear from some of you!
Take care,
Geert