Which Java based framework --Lift or Rife ?

Question

I need to build a CRUD application to maintain a simple set of tables. Normally I would do this in php but I cannot deploy this in the client environment.

I want to do this reasonably quickly and vanilla J2EE, EJBs, spring, Hibernate etc. is just plain overkill.

I am looking at either Rife or Lift frameworks. They both seem to have RAD capabilities, good Webpage as UI support, reasonable ORM support, and, can be deployed as a package with Jetty or Tomcat.

Does anyone out there have experience of these? I would be interested in any opinion no matter how subjective. Also can anyone suggest anything better!

Thanks for the Advice. I was intially attracted to Lift and Rife because I can deploy the developed apps as a compiled WAR file -- with no source code inside. I was also impressed by the fact that large parts of twitter have been rewritten in lift.

I Rife would seem to be ideal for my purposes but it has not been updted since 2007 which is a bit worrying.

So it looks like Grails and Groovy here I come!

Answer 1

I am not familiar with Lift or Rife, but I have used Grails. The default scaffolding (much like Rails) will get you most of the way there. Runs on Tomcat and Jetty just fine.

Answer 2

Unless you want to use Scala LIFT may be a bad choice. I haven't tried Rife so I can't give any feedback on that.

What are you trying to do? The more information you give the better suggestions can be made.

Answer 3

I evaluated Rife and it is a solid choice, but it is really geared towards those who want to do it in Java code (although it doesn't force that for all components of the web application). Coming from PHP I would think that Grails as Jeffery suggested is a more natural fit, unless you do know Java already.

Have you considered Quercus? It can be deployed on Jetty or Tomcat, although it will obviously have a more natural home on Resin. The open source version would probably be fast enough for you.

Answer 4

Look into

• Play (This may be an excellent fit for you)
• Grails
• Restlet
• Rails inside JRuby

All of the above can be backed into a WAR, most offer there own way for running self contained, and everything except Restlet has some built in ORM.