On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 1:06 PM, glenn <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> Just some observations from a struggling lift user...
>
> Yes, I see it's utility in delivering dynamic html to the browser. But
> in today's world of rapidly evolving technologies for mashups and flex-
> like richness and gadgetization, interoperability is the key to
> adoption in the enterprise. It's not enough to say you can selectively
> rewrite your legacy apps in lift. Lift, out of the box, is still
> another technology for building monolithing web apps (war files). Not
> the best stategy.
>

In terms of Lift being the sole resident of a WAR file, that's not the
case.  Lift is implemented as a Servlet Filter and can be co-resident in a
WAR file with other J(2)EE technology.  There is nothing inherent in Lift
that prevents this.  Please learn more about the technology before ranting
against it.


>
>
> I find the keepers of the code, in response to numerous postings on
> this site, suffer from NIH anxiety and easily dismiss interoperability
> with other frameworks, either because they believe they have a
> superior implementation, so why use someone else's, or, if you really
> feel you need it, roll your own.


Please be specific.  You suggested integrating with Sling.  Please tell me
what Sling offers that Lift does not?  Are you willing to do the work?

We've got a punch-list for our 1.1 release.  We've got so many resources and
we've pretty much got our work cut out for us.  In general, our development
is driven by a combination of our individual needs in our day jobs and
common requests on this list.  We've integrated Lift with a lot of things
over the years: PayPal, OpenID, Facebook, YUI, jQuery, JPA, etc.  We're
currently working on integrating Lift is the JTA, OSGi, etc.

But part of managing a successful project is knowing when to say "No."  If
we implemented every idea that everybody who's been part of the Lift
community for a month suggested (putting aside the resource constraints),
we'd have a disgusting Frankenmonster of a heap of junk.  Instead, Lift is
reasonably conherent and fairly lightweight given the breadth of
functionality that it offers.  I'm not the only person that thinks so... the
IEEE journal is saying pretty nice things about Lift as well... see
http://steve.vinoski.net/pdf/IC-Scala_and_Lift.pdf

So, if there's a superior implementation of something out there, please let
us know along with a compelling argument that the technology is superior.
But please understand that compelling includes a deep discussion of what
Lift currently offers.


>
>
> My response to that is, it just doesn't work that way. The best
> technologies are not just agnostic on the issue of interoperability,
> they embrace pluggability, and let the developer community choose the
> winners and losers.


Please let me know where Lift is not "pluggable".  Please be concrete.
We've worked hard to put intercept points at just about every layer of the
Lift response and rendering pipeline so that people can interoperate with
other systems.  If we're missing something, please let us know what you want
to interoperate with, how, and why.


>
>
> Lift suffers from not even having an out-of the-box declarative
> configuration capability.


This is just wrong.  Most Lift configuration is based on Scala's
PartialFunctions which gives you declarative syntax without the constraints
or syntactic ugliness of XML or attributes.  Learn it before you complain.


> And, frankly no, I don't have the time or
> resources to write my own. Please, give me something other than just
> an <a> tag to work with.


Reading this, I'm not really sure that the Lift as a technology or the Lift
community is the right place for you.  Lift as a framework is different.
This is intentional and based on my 13 years of writing web frameworks.  The
Lift community offers a lot of hand-holding and a welcoming environment to
newbies to help them come up to speed with Lift.  We've been improving
documentation.  We in fact do interoperate with a lot of technologies, both
on the J2EE stack and across the Internet.  We do ask that before people
complain about what they've done, they have some grounding in Lift
technology and the way Lift does things.

David


>
>
> >
>


-- 
Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net
Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890
Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
Git some: http://github.com/dpp

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