Rife

Agility

Some agility is lost due to the fact that there are no control structures in the templating language (see the templating section below.) While this may be more philosophically sound, for our modest templating needs it is probably over-engineering.

The amount of XML configuration is similar to tapestry.

Support

There is a small but active rife community.

Skinability

Nothing special that I see.

Performance / Scalability

Hard to find any info on this so far...

I8ln

None as far as I can tell.

Expression / Templating Language

Rife templates are normal HTML with some specially formatted HTML comments being used to render dynamic values and blocks of html.

Rife takes a unique approach in that there are no control constructs (loops, conditionals, etc.) in the templating language. Instead, the backing request handling classes have full control over the template and can render the same block multiple times with different params, or not render them at all, or manipulate them in anyway. This level of control over the template from the backing class is fairly unique and allows for a very clean separation of logic and view.

One criticism is that the comment tags are kind of ugly and hard to read.

Componentization

Not so much, but you can define parameterized blocks of html and use them on many pages.

Summary

Rife is a very interesting approach to web-app development featuring an end-to-end solution all the way from dao's to the view. However, this feature set is too large and not appropriate for scooby which is not a "traditional" web app. The lack of an expression language, control constructs will also get in our way here (although a good idea for other types of apps).