Development on RIFE started after having crafted several in-house web application frameworks in Perl, Java and Php. Over the years a certain methodology started to emerge and a growing number of patterns and technology trials proved themselves very useful and extremely maintainable. RIFE is our third generation framework and its development started late 2001 as a full-time endeavour to consolidate everything from the past in a consistant whole.

The main aim is to facilitate a web developer's job by offering easy to comprehend concepts that are never mandatory. They however offer a good trade-off between developer productivity, development comfort, application design, run-time performance and maintenance. We think we've achieved these goals and also succeeded to introduce a large number of exciting and novel concepts which will change your view on application development.