Rift

A Java web framework built on top of the standard Servlet API.

Getting Started

It's very simple to get started using Rift. All in all you need to add a few lines to your web.xml file, include the rift jars on your classpath and off you go.

Maven Repository

In case you want to use Rift in your Maven build, here's a repository for you.

<repositories>
	<repository>
		<id>wireweb-public-repo</id>
		<url>http://opensource.wireweb.co.uk/maven2</url>
	</repository>
</repositories>

web.xml

Start by adding the Rift servlet context listener.

<listener>
	<listener-class>uk.co.wireweb.rift.core.RiftServletContextListener</listener-class>
</listener>

After this we'll need the Rift filter which is the entry point for all things Rift.

<filter>
	<filter-name>Rift</filter-name>
	<filter-class>uk.co.wireweb.rift.core.Rift</filter-class>
</filter>

And a mapping.

<filter-mapping>
	<filter-name>Rift</filter-name>
	<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

That's it for web.xml.

Creating your first page

Now it gets interesting. Every page you want to create with Rift is backed by a class.

MyFirstPage.java

@Webpage(serves = "/myfirst.page")
public class MyFirstPage {

	@Parameter
	private String name;
	
	@Get
	public View get(final WebpageContext contex) {
		return new ForwardView("/WEB-INF/view/myfirstpage.jsp");
	}

	public String getName() {
		return this.name;
	}
}

This class now represents what's on the /myfirst.page URL. In order for this to work we need to now create the /WEB-INF/view/myfirstpage.jsp which renders the actual view. You'll notice that Rift doesn't actually get involved with the markup, there are no tag libraries as of yet. As you also might have noticed above, there is a private member annotated with @Parameter, this tells Rift that it should automatically try and populate it with any incoming request parameter value for a parameter called name.

You can optionally tell Rift what the name of the request parameter is. Lets say you've gone down the route of using a really odd request parameter name such as users_name and you wanted to map that to a more convenient Java bean name. All you need to do is change the annotation to be @Parameter("users_name"), this will tell Rift that the request parameter is actually called users_name but it will still be mapped to the class member name.

Another really clever thing about @Parameter worth mentioning here is that you can set the field type to be any of the primitives and Rift will automatically try to convert the incoming request parameter value for you. At the moment there is no nice way for handling any exceptions that might be thrown during this process such as NumberFormatException. Rift will also handle the case where a request parameter is an array, set or list. More on this later on.

/WEB-INF/view/myfirstpage.jsp

Hello ${page.name}!

Just create the myfirstpage.jsp file and add the above line to it. Some magic will now happen, Rift automatically adds an attribute to the request called page, this attribute is the actual class that represents your page, in this case it would be the MyFirstPage instance. Therefore we can now use ${page.name} in our page to print out the value of the member name. Remember to add a getter to your class in order for this to work since JSTL requires things to be valid beans.