Ivo - Bespin looks very promising - thank you for mentioning it; I had never heard of it. I just googled it and took a look here:
http://bespin.mozilla.com/ and I think it's very positive that DPP has expressed interest in making lift play well with Bespin/Thunderclap. Like you, I also want to develop rich internet apps (RIAs). After evaluating lots of web app frameworks, I find lift to be the most promising on to hitch my wagon to. I've tried out Adobe Flex. I'm concerned that although Adobe *claims* that the Flash player is the most-installed piece of software on the planet, in real life there are still situations where it can actually be missing from a person's browser. I myself have had a few experiences when I've switched machines or upgraded browsers and suddenly there's no working Flash player. So although Flex's sortable datagrids look cool I'm hesitant to go with Flex. For public-facing web apps I think it's better to deploy on a truly least-common- denominator platform, something everybody really has ... and realistically that seems to be a standards-compliant browser + JavaScript. So after looking at many other web app frameworks, I've decided to learn lift. The main things that attracted me to lift are its use of scala (one of my interests is algebraic programming, so a good type system is very important to me), the way lift borrows from the best of other leading web app frameworks (Rails, Seaside, Django, Wicket), its support for Ajax and Comet, and its security. Now, regarding the choice of JavaScript library: I'm still new to JavaScript programming, so take what I say with a grain of salt here. But after playing around with demos for YUI and JQuery, I found ExtJS to be a bit more impressive (another one of my interests is data- intensive number-crunching apps, so, like you, I want to have the best possible gridviews and treeviews to give the user a powerful UI for slicing and dicing all that data). -- The JQuery online demos don't even show any datagrids (their current demo of "sortable" is a handful of draggable widgets on a page - not a datagrid with a sortable column). -- The YUI online demo does include a decent-looking datagrid with custom cell formatting, and a treeview with editable node labels: http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/datatable/dt_formatting_source.html http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/examples/treeview/tv-edit.html -- But the ExtJS datagrid and treeviews are way more impressive, approaching the sophistication and responsiveness of native/desktop UIs: http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/grid/edit-grid.html http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tree/reorder.html http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tree/two-trees.html http://extjs.com/deploy/dev/examples/tree/check-tree.html (Actually, given how frustratingly slow MS-Windows can be when initially displaying a treeview control for a directory, the ExtJS treeview may be even *more* responsive than some native/desktop treeviews :-) I understand that due to its current licensing ExtJS cannot be "built- in" to lift, but it's still available as a JavaScript library with a dual license for either open-source or commercial use, and it should be fairly straightforward to add it to a lift app, as per the earlier discussion here: http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb/browse_thread/thread/5e4f5e424d33db40?hl=en# So I think lift plus a JavaScript library (and database backend) can be an optimal choice for making data-intensive RIAs right now, with an excellent roadmap for the future (Goat Rodeo, Bespin/Thunderclap). - Stefan Scott On Aug 7, 4:55 pm, ivo <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > I want to start learning about promising technologies for building > full stack RIAs. It doesn't need to be something very powerful today, > but something that I can seriously consider for building commercial > applications in 1 or 2 years from now. > > Let me divide what I mean by "full stack" into 3 parts: (1) Data > backend, (2) Web framework and (3) UI framework. > > I was wondering if Lift + Goat Rodeo could be it, but I still think > that the UI framework is still missing. Quoting a post from David that > I found around the web: "The Bespin folks are working on a GUI builder > called Thunderclap. Dion and I want to make it so that building GUI > apps with Bespin and Lift is as simple as wiring up applications in OS > X's Interface Builder." Do you have any other news about this project > (or know where to look at)? > > Please share your thoughts... > > Thanks! --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lift" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
