RIFE's 1.0 release attracted quite some attention from prominent Java developers.

The announcement thread on The ServerSide contains a lot of encouraging and supportive comments.

If you've never given RIFE a look because you thought it was just another action-based MVC framework, think again. There are many features that are available nowhere else and its core web engine is totally unique, offering possibilities to your web application that would be impossible or very tedious with other frameworks.

Face it, the scope of web applications is expanding. Text-based information sites will still continue to use regular XHTML, but a lot of new application types are appearing now that Rich Internet Applications (RIA) are a reality.

Personally, I'm standing behind the open-source OpenLaszlo platform. The main reason is that consumers are adopting computers and the internet for most of their multi-media needs. Nobody finds it weird anymore that you listen to music or watch a movie on your computer. Portable music players like the iPod go hand-in-hand with desktop applications to manage them, applications for home-recorded movie editing are included in most operating systems and Apple's Garageband brings awesome audio creation power to everyone. OpenLaszlo allows you to write RIA that incorporate sound, music, images, video and text easily, just look at what Pandora has done.