The "Getting Started" document got me hooked on Lift. :-)
I guess I'll report my struggles from there. I don't know if what I did
is typical.
After actually running the two examples from the "Getting Started" docs,
I looked and found some other examples, did some looking around in the
mailing list archives and started reading the "Exploring Lift" book.
As a starting application of lift, I want to write a simple purchase
order tracking webapp. It was easy enough to figure out how to hook up
PostgreSQL instead of Derby. I started experimenting with the CRUDify
trait and got several tables working, but then I got stuck trying to
make a more cohesive app. What I could not figure out was how to use
CRUDify's functionality without having to put all the options in the
SiteMap. So I spent a lot of time trying to figure out the SiteMap
class. I have since come to the realization that I probably shouldn't
be using CRUDify, as non of the examples actually use it. I have also
realized that I should be putting rules in LiftRules.rewrite.
So, my point, I guess, is that it was never clear to me what request
rewriting was all about. I didn't understand the explanations and
basically just skipped it and tried to do everything with SiteMap.
What I have taken away from this: "Request Rewriting" sounds very
advanced and made me think of sendmail rewriting rules! (Yuck!)
Maybe it would be good to have some blurbs on "Lift for JEE
developers". What is the equivalent of mapping a URL to a servlet and
how do you deal with the URL pattern matching. (I want to map "/foo/*"
to a some soft of action)
So that would then be a nice lead-in to coverage of net.liftweb.http.S,
right?
Anyway, back to API docs, it never occurred to be to look at the docs
for net.liftweb.http.LiftRules! There are actually lots of comments
there. The "rewrite" is kinda hidden there, so it probably should be
called out in the class docs. Then for the actual "rewrite" docs, it
would be nice to give some examples of what should go in there or
provide a link to external docs showing the same.
How have other people tackled the learning curve of lift?
--Andrew
Derek Chen-Becker wrote:
> In terms of the API docs part of it would just be expanding on the
> current scaladoc to provider better explanation. Obviously there are a
> ton of classes to document, so I'd like to focus efforts on getting
> the most bang for the buck. I was thinking of starting with
> net.liftweb.http.{LiftRules,S,SHtml} and making the documentation on
> them *outstanding*. We can branch out from there. If you're coming to
> Lift new, it would also be helpful to find out what we're missing or
> need to cover better in the "Getting Started" document on the web
> site. If you want to read through that and provide feedback here on
> the list that would be great.
>
> Derek
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 12:20 PM, Andrew Scherpbier
> <and...@scherpbier.org <mailto:and...@scherpbier.org>> wrote:
>
>
> Derek,
> That's awesome. I want to help. What can I do? I can start by proof
> reading stuff.
>
> --Andrew
>
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