Jack, For my money Rails is somewhat more mature than lift, but lift is on a trajectory to overtake Rails feature-wise and is certainly already there performance-wise. The real issue, to me, is Scala vs Ruby. Quite apart from being more slightly more performant and equally expressive, the real win of Scala is its types allow you scale the code over time. What i mean by that is that a type system like Scala's allows you to
- navigate code - substitute and refactor code while preserving properties - design for abstraction One of the biggest problems of Ruby code -- and seasoned Ruby devs will tell you this -- is that in a code block of 10 lines -- that is part of say a 100K line project -- if i point to a line of code, you can't tell me what it is doing. This is compounded by the fact that with monkey-patching, even if you thought you knew, with the next check-in in some other part of the codebase, you don't. In the same situation in Scala any given expression has a type that the compiler may infer. So, i don't need to know Joe Bloggs who wrote that block. i reason about what it does through the types. This gives better separation of *dev team*s -- not just code blocks. This is good if you want to scale up your efforts organizationally -- either by spreading it out over different groups working at approximately the same time, or by spreading development out over time. i'm not saying this is a silver bullet. Software is hard and there are always non-linear or cyclical dependencies, but types really help with practical development. After a while, you get to the point where you can design using types, and then cutting the code is like falling off a log. At this point designing for highly leveraged abstractions that significantly reduce the amount of code and increase the applicability of code is within your grasp. The guy who makes these points in a much less zealous and much more reasoned, dispassionate way with lots of practical examples is Bill Venners. His recent talk for JavaOne -- which is on video (i'll look for the link) -- is quite powerful in this regard. Heck, even Charles Nutter, in his own blog acknowledges that Scala is the heir apparent of Java for the JVM. Don't get me wrong -- i'm not a Scala biggot. There are a lot of corners of this language i don't like. For my money, Haskell is a better language. But, Haskell doesn't run on the JVM. You can't ship Haskell apps as jars or wars and smoothly hook them into maven repos, and you can't very easily build Haskell apps using standard JVM libs. So, that's why Scala, and that's why lift. Well... there's also the fact that the Scala and lift communities are populated by very impressive people who are very open and incredibly responsive. Best wishes, --greg On Sun, Aug 23, 2009 at 7:45 AM, jack <jack.wid...@gmail.com> wrote: > > I am doing a startup company that involves both a lot of processing on > the backend (in the code) and a decent amount of comet/ajax in the > frontend.It is very important that the code quickly on the server. I > have seen the light with respect to Scala and Lift looks terrific. My > only concern is how new it is and the availability of resources > (programmers, books etc). > > I really do want to use Lift instead of Rails. Could somebody please > convince me? :) > > > > -- L.G. Meredith Managing Partner Biosimilarity LLC 1219 NW 83rd St Seattle, WA 98117 +1 206.650.3740 http://biosimilarity.blogspot.com --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lift" group. To post to this group, send email to liftweb@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
