Thank you for writing your comments. As most have said in the thread, honest feedback is valuable if not essential and often hard to come by, so please don't be put off by the odd negative response.
I'm fairly newbie here too and share some of your concerns about Lift. For what it's worth I thought I'd share my thoughts to add to the melting pot… I'm an ex-Java coder who ran a business using Apache Cocoon in it's early days. As an agile advocate I got frustrated with Java and had a flirted with Grails (Groovy on Rails) for one commercial project. But whilst I liked Groovy's conciseness I found it's loose typing and runtime 'magic' forced undue emphasis on writing test after test. Then I discovered Scala and fell in love! It's a really nice language with an amazing blend of conciseness, consistency and power. So, when I found Lift and read around it I felt that Lift was a next generation web framework built on the type safe solid functional Scala language, the speed of the JVM and it's mature libraries and with inherent and designed features that would lend itself to scalability in the new world of cloud computing. I checked out the community and it looked strong and high on common sense and expertise. Finally I checked out it's users and found some big organisations using it already. So in comment to others, Lift had a good image for me, it was trying to get started using it that was my biggest hurdle and I share much of what Miles said about this. The "Exploring Lift" PDF book is essential but certainly wasn't easy to find at first—I see it's linked from the front page now which I don't think it was when I started. The new wiki pages are starting to be a really useful source of info though it's a shame GitHub's wiki mechanism is so flat-file! If I was to make one criticism of the Exploring Lift book is that the example code tends to be unnecessarily complicated to demonstrate the particular thing that is being explained. One of the biggest problems I had in the early days of not knowing Scala was trying to understand what the missing code, substituted by "..." in the code listings would have been. Indeed in the really early days I was trying to figure out what "..." did in Scala—which isn't as stupid as it sounds! I have been a bit disappointed with the level of commenting in the major objects and methods of the framework. When I can't find any documentation I often go back to the source code and I sometimes find either no comments or comments that are out of date with parameter names not matching the actual parameters of the methods. I offered to help but found that contributing isn't as easy as it should be. Increasingly I feel that one of the problems with Scala and Lift is that the power and beauty of the language and framework are sometimes lost in code that has lost restraint. I think Lift would benefit from: * Tidier code - laid out and structured with concern given to making it easy to follow. Just because Scala can do it in one line doesn't mean that four lines wouldn't be better. Just because you can put multiple classes and objects in a single scala file doesn't mean it's bad to break code up into separate files. * Fewer public functions, function variants and implicits. Almost everything in Lift seems to be public and there seems to be a love of creating every possible variant of a function rather than letting the user do the odd extra step themselves. Finally, implicits get everywhere, and implicit conversions are basically unexplained magic to someone trying to make sense of unfamiliar code. It's not a bad thing to explicitly convert something—it helps to explain to you and others what you are trying to do. Okay, better leave it there! I'm currently using SBT rather than Maven which is really nice to use but currently underdocumented. Have grown to dislike Maven against all my attempts to like it. All in all Lift is really powerful, I'm using it, and I would really like it to succeed, but, like Scala, it currently lacks some marketing flare and is succeeding by it's brilliance alone. For those familiar with Crossing the Chasm, I'd surmise that most Lift users are "Technology enthusiasts" and the market won't grow until Lift becomes attractive to the "Visionaries" who basically need some documentation! Stuart. On Mar 6, 4:43 am, cageface <[email protected]> wrote: > Like many other web developers, I abandoned some heavyweight Java web -- 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.
