Everyone agrees that the dazzling amount of web application frameworks for Java is confusing. However, I think that several of them have valid unique approaches to web application development and shouldn't compete but collaborate as much as possible, making the viewpoint important, not the back-end functionalities. The industry as a whole benefits when as much common features as possible are available, it is the same problem space after all. The statement from WebWork about this approach has been posted on their blog, and RIFE totally adheres to these ideas.

So, to set a good example, the developers of WebWork and RIFE have started collaborating to produce a general purpose pure Java continuations engine. Since RIFE has provided this natively for several years, we started by extracting the related source code from the current RIFE sources and created a new sub-project: RIFE/Continuations.

The RIFE team expects to continue to work with the WebWork team on this library and maybe more. On a side-note, we also started discussing with the Wicket team and will be getting together at JavaPolis to at least exchange mind-share and see what can be borrowed, learned or extracted.

Exciting times are ahead for Java web application development ...