If there's no rational reason to use Lift, then perhaps you could find
another community to spend your time in.
I didn't say that there was no rational reason to use Lift BUT THAT YOU ARE
FAILING TO COMMUNICATE WHAT THAT REASON MIGHT BE TO POTENTIAL USERS! You
can't expect potential users to be Internet mind readers. Which is what your
current strategy amounts to - other than "People will try Lift because there
is a buzz about Scala."
> Lift is not a clone of any framework. It's different and there are
> reasons for those differences. If you don't like them, please use what
> you like best. Use what feels most comfortable for you. Use what works
> best for you.
>
I very carefully did NOT say that Lift should be a clone. I did say that,
when you ask users to do things contrary to their expectations of a modern
web framework, you tell them WHY you are asking them to do that and what the
payoff will be for them. I'd talk them through these "surprises" with a
series of short snippets in boxes - I'd also use these snippets for any
"gotchas" like those critical spaces after the "/". I might start with:
Working through this tutorial you'll encounter a horrible surprise - Lift is
not YARC! (Yet Another Rails Clone.) That is because we have designed Lift
to be a fundamentally different creature to Rails. Rails is an excellent
framework whose first priority is ease of use for simple jobs where server
efficiency can be traded away to get a site running quickly with minimum
effort. Lift is a framework designed for jobs where Rails has run out. A
well designed Lift site can handle up to 20 times the traffic of an
equivalent Rails site on the same server. And while it perhaps isn't as easy
to do simple things in Lift as in Rails, it is much easier to do most of the
hard ones. In a way, both frameworks carry their philosophy in their names -
- Rails expects you, the programmer, to be happy to run on a relatively
pre-determined track in return for a simpler life.
- Lift, like its host language Scala, is designed for HEAVY LIFTING. Its
priorities are delivering security, maintainability and performance over the
widest possible range of applications. It makes obtaining these good things
as simple as possible, but occasionally you just have to eat your greens if
you want to grow up big and strong.
Those are the rationales behind the design choices we made. Creating your
first toy site with Lift will take longer than with Rails, but creating your
first secure, scalable site will take less time. Whenever Lift wants you to
do something particularly surprising in this tutorial you'll see another box
explaining why and what the pay-off will be for you. You'll also see boxes
warning you of any fiddly 'gotchas'. Happy Lifting!
Lightly adapted that might work as an intro for Lift in general. It
*differentiates* you from Rails and gives potential users the info they need
to decide whether or nor Lift is right for them to try, which is what
technical marketing should be about. (It also obeys the "tell them three
times" rule of Writing Stuff You Really Want People To Remember.")
Oh - and I have now seen the Lift logo, and I think it looks fine!
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