Timothy Perrett wrote:
>
> By all means, come here with questions and you will find this group to be
> very responsive and helpful, but do not come here and automatically assume
> that you can illuminate to us the errors in our project marketing or
> experience.
>
What's automatic about Mark's analysis? He's a new Lift user, he's told you
what the new user experience is like - he did the appropriate work to be
able to do this. If there is anything automatic here it is your dismissal of
the problems that Mark had. This sort of user feedback is gold - he's made a
real effort to tell you what trying to get started with Lift was like for
him. And reading what Mark wrote, I'm sure that he is much brighter and more
interested in Lift than the average Java/RoR programmer.
Lift is not Rails. It really bugs me when people are like "oh, well rails
does XYZ".
The guy never said it was. He explained why he switched to Rails and why he
thinks Rails has been successful.
The important point that Rails people who want their framework to takeoff
have to understand here is ***that at no time during Mark's experience did
anyone communicate a reason to him why Lift was worth persevering with.***
That's what marketing is about. If Mark had known there was a strong enough
potential benefit then he would have persisted. At the moment Lift's only
perceived benefit seems to be that it provides you with a web framework for
Scala. That's a nice strategy for getting a couple of dozen FPophiles to
commit code, but it won't take Lift anywhere in the real world of "What does
this framework do for my project/career/business."
You need to start telling people what Lift especially well so that they have
some idea why they might use it! The best effort I have seen to do this
comes not from the Lift community but from another reviewer, here -
http://ikaisays.com/2009/03/03/first-impressions-of-lift-scala-web-development-framework-from-a-ruby-on-rails-developer/
Other concerns:
- I suspect that Lift has enough mass inside the Scala community to prevent
the emergence of another web framework. And that without an acceptable web
framework Scala - which I am now 100% in love with - will not be a
successful language.
- How much of the difficulty that people seem to have in using Lift is
intrinsic to the framework and how much to poor docs? What are the
***pay-offs*** for those design decisions that have made Lift harder to use?
(Even when this simply means less Rails-like.) Communicating these would go
a long way to reducing newbie frustration. Is Lift even designed to have as
wide an appeal as RoR or Grails? If not, be frank about it and communicate
where its strengths lie.
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