A few notes from my behalf. I understand Tim's perspective and I fully agree with, but this is a perspective of a guy coming from Lift side which is likely to differ from the perspective of a new comer.
1. I definitely do not agree with something like "here is why you should use A and not B thus you need to persevere with A" ... this sounds like an american anti-commercial for detergents (no offense US folks). Where you believe it or not we do value the good things of other frameworks and learn from their mistakes. 2. Even if Lift docs are way behind I still think that there is truly enough material out there to convince people of its value or help them make a decision whether to adopt it or not. There are hundreds of people using Lift and quite a handful of corporates (SAS, Novell, Twitter, Xerox, ... Tim and Dave have a wider list) 3. You say "... for those design decisions that have made Lift harder to use" .... what design decisions? I'm quite aware about lift's design and guts and I'm not aware of any of design decisions that made Lift harder to use. There is a fundamental difference between understanding the design and just say or allude that Lift is hard to use by design. 4. Yes I agree that Lift has a powerful contribution to Scala adoption but in reality I think it is a mutual thing. 5. "How much of the difficulty that people seem to have in using Lift is intrinsic to the framework and how much to poor docs?" good question but hard to tell. People come with different mindsets and backgrounds. For some it is hard to accept View-First as they seem to have a too strong MVC mind set. Some are just open minded (most of people on this list I'd add) and this people came with concrete cases and I truly believe that Lift team helped them quite a bit. 6. Lift strengths were communicated by this list, by talks done by David, Tim, Derek myself etc., By the "Definitive guide to Lift" book, numerous blog posts etc. numerous examples, .. if you checkout Lift you'll get a list of example apps that demonstrates it power. So I resent this argument. 7. I don't know what you are refer to "appeal" when you are talking about Lift. Is it about visual design of site, docs etc ? If not please define appeal in this context? .. I tend to thing that this is a subjective term in many respects. On Mar 6, 7:02 pm, jonathan mawson <[email protected]> wrote: > 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-de... > > 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. > > -- > View this message in > context:http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junk... > Sent from the liftweb mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- 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.
