Last week, Sun Belgium asked me to give a 15 minute overview about the state of AJAX frameworks for Java programmers at their JavaOne Afterglow 2006 mini-conference. It's difficult to say something meaningful in such a short timespan, but I did my best.

This is the PDF of my presentation, in case it might be useful for someone:

  Static PDF document (170KB)

I just released RIFE 1.5 Milestone 2. The web engine's internals have been heavily refactored and optimized, which is why this is still a milestone release and not a final one.

You get a speed release during development with this release, compared to version 1.4. Before, RIFE checked for every request if any of the site-related files had changed, to be able to reload the structure on-the-fly. This thus also meant for all the images, styles, ... (since RIFE is a filter). In this release, the reload check is only made once every 10 seconds (this is of course configurable and is only used when auto site reloading is active).

The other major new features of this release, compared to v1.4, are:

• support for any number of simultaneous continuations in different embedded elements that are part of the same page
• fine-grained control over continuation trees and their invalidation
• important fixes to session state storage
• annotations support for element declaration (example)
• step-back continuations (example)
• stateful components (which you use submissions and reflexive datalinks)
• complete injection and outjection support for all element data (inputs, parameters, inbean, outbeans, incookies, outcookies, parameters, globalvars and globalcookies)
• two new examples: stateful counters (source), hangman (source)
• support for creating RIFE applications without any XML (not even participants.xml)
• upgraded a lot of supported 3rd party libraries
• fixes to meta data merging

The full changelog is here:
https://rife.dev.java.net/files/documents/204/35973/ChangeLog

Hope you enjoy this beta release and please notify us should you run into any problems.