cageface <[email protected]> writes:
[lots of stuff about layout]
I agree and as Marius wrote it's (the website at least) is a known issue
and is being worked on. But it's moving slowly.
I think the underlying problem here is that the Lift committers are
mostly code geeks and not really into the visual aesthetics. Maybe this
is a difference from the Rails community: I think a lot (not all of
course) of Lift's users have a Java background which is usually not
connected with great visual artwork. But many of the Rails guys (the few
I've talked to at least), seems to come from design studios etc. where
there's very much focus on design.
So if someone in the Lift community has the skills to help out in this
area that would be awesome :-)
We can talk technical merits all day long, but at the end of the day I
think first impressions matter for wider adoption.
> Oh well, pushing past the wall of text intro we discover that we need
> Maven. Alarms are starting to go off in the heads of many Java
> refugees that remember Maven as the nadir of the XML-situp
> overabstracted agony that was pre-Rails Java web dev. I imagine many
> people have signed off by this point. We go download maven and press
> on to the first actual command we can run, which is an impressively
> cryptic 8-line mvn invocation that seems to take about 10 minutes to
> download every single apache and codehaus jar file.
I don't like maven either, but you're not forced into using maven. But
since all tutorials use it you may get that impression. I have a blog
post waiting for a simpler (albeit less powerful) way to get started.
> When this finally winds down we start the server and take a look at
> our homely start page and bounce back to the docs. XHTML. Hmmm. Didn't
> everybody give up on that a few years ago? HTML literals *in* the
> code?
Marius already addressed this and I agree with him :-)
> All the "snippets" we're going to be editing live six levels deep in
> the project directory structure? This will be fun with emacs/ vim...
No one is forcing you to have a six level deep directory structure. The
src/main/scala prefix is a maven convention. But I think it makes sense.
In my latest projects I've dropped the usual java package conventions of
com.company.project and now just use project. Works out nicely.
[...]
> And at this point we give up and start quickly paging through the rest
> of the tutorial only to come to this:
> object priority extends MappedInt(this) {
> override def defaultValue = 5
>
> override def validations = validPriority _ :: super.validations
>
> def validPriority(in: Int): List[FieldError] =
> if (in > 0 && in <= 10) Nil
> else List(FieldError(this, <b>Priority must be 1-10</b>))
>
> override def _toForm = Full(select(ToDo.priorityList,
> Full(is.toString),
> f => set(f.toInt)))
> }
>
> and we suddenly find a new appreciation for :validates_numericality_of
I don't know it, but you could probably write the equivalent validation
function in Lift. Remember, Lift is still relatively young compared to
Rails. It won't have all the bells & whistles yet.
> and we also wonder why our model should be specifying it's
> representation in the form and we decide to go googling for whatever
> the Scala equivalent of Sinatra is.
I don't know Sinatra but found this description: "Sinatra is a very
simple, yet powerful, Domain Specific Language (DSL) for defining
RESTful HTTP actions, and then defining how the application is going to
respond to them"
This sounds awfully close to the lift-webkit module. If you don't like
the Lift ORM, don't use it. Writing a REST api with Lift is quite
clean. You could probably google for some examples.
> I apologize if this seems flippant but I really think that a lot of
> people won't even push on this far, never mind having to do the
> homework of learning the basics of scala first. I know that docs and
> introductory materials aren't usually that much fun to work on and I
> can imagine that the framework itself is much more polished and
> sophisticated but as potential recruiting material I think this just
> isn't very good.
As I wrote earlier, I think first impressions are important. Thanks for
sharing.
I can only say that I've found Lift a joy to use and very powerful at
the lower layers. As you move up in the abstraction layers (think forms
etc) it's not as polished yet, but it has a solid foundation to build on.
/Jeppe
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