[Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
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! -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27811402.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
Re: [Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
Jonathan, your comments are someplace between not helpful and troll-like. It'd be best if you did not continue to participate in this thread. On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 5:36 AM, jonathan mawson umpti...@gmail.com wrote: 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! -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27811402.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comliftweb%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en. -- Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890 Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp Surf the harmonics -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
Re: [Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
I think that Jonathan was impolite in expressing his frustration at being misunderstood. But are his points not valuable? - David Pollakfeeder.of.the.be...@gmail.com wrote: Jonathan, your comments are someplace between not helpful and troll-like. It'd be best if you did not continue to participate in this thread. On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 5:36 AM, jonathan mawson umpti...@gmail.com wrote: 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! -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27811402.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comliftweb%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en. -- Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890 Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp Surf the harmonics -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit
Re: [Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Naftoli Gugenheim naftoli...@gmail.comwrote: I think that Jonathan was impolite in expressing his frustration at being misunderstood. First, don't you think that it's ironic that someone who was trying to teach us about marketing was so incapable of expressing himself effectively? Would you take the marketing advice of someone who cannot communicate basic concepts without resorting to belittling and screaming? What you don't know is that Jonathan made some posting that were more troll-like that I did not approve (something that's very rare) because they were just rants about us not understanding what he was saying (including quotes like Lift is just the flavor of the month). Some other things you don't know is that Jonathan contacted me privately... something I generally frown on (see http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb/browse_thread/thread/c7a97cbf60780f0 ) He suggested that I read some books by Geoffrey Moorehttp://mdv.com/team_bio.html?id=11and some books about not letting MBAs fleece you. He also offered to help with marketing by offering his email address and no other information about who he was or why his help would be of value. Hmmm another example of not effective marketing. (and yes, I did search for him via Google and LinkedIn to see if he was some hot shot who was used to talking in short-hand... but he was no where to be found.) I suggested that he check out who I run with and asked him to tell me why he would help with marketing Lift. His response was that he Googled me and was unable to find any information about me on Google, that I was not nearly as good at communications as I thought and that I should include information (a mini-CV in his words) on the Lift site. So, let's work through this. First, there are a couple of links in my sig-line. The first one is to Apress's listing for my book: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890 This page includes information about the author: David Pollak David Pollak has been writing commercial software since 1977. He wrote the award–winning Mesa spreadsheet, which in 1992 was the first real–time spreadsheet. Wall Street companies traded billions of dollars a day through Mesa. In 1996, David sold his company to CMP Media and became CTO of CMP Media’s NetGuide Live and was one of the first large–scale users of Java and WebLogic to power an Internet site. In 1998, David released Integer, the world’s first browser–accessible, multiuser spreadsheet. Since 2000, David has been consulting for companies including Hewlett–Packard, Pretzel Logic/WebGain, BankServ, Twitter, and SAP. David has been using Scala since 2006 and is the lead developer of the Lift Web Framework. There's also a link to my Twitter feed http://twitter.com/dpp which contains a link to my blog http://blog.lostlake.org/. Now, let's take a look at the Lift http://liftweb.net web site. On the front page is a mini-bio: David Pollak has been writing commercial software since 1977. He wrote the first real-time spreadsheet and the worlds highest performance spreadsheet engine. Since 1996, David has been using and devising web development tools. So, even without searching, one can find a fair amount about me. But, let's click through to the Team page on the Lift site. There's a slightly longer bio: David Pollak has been writing commercial software since 1977. He wrote the first real-time spreadsheet and the worlds highest performance spreadsheet engine. Since 1996, David has been using and devising web development tools. As CTO of CMP Media, David oversaw the first large-scale deployment of WebLogic. David was CTO and VPE at Cenzic, a web application security company. David has also developed numerous commercial projects in Ruby on Rails. In 2007, David founded the Lift Web Framework open source project. If you spend a little time with some of the other team bios, one in particular will seem out of place... a suit. Specifically, Debby Meredith's bio reads: I'm a currently an engineering management consultant and a venture partner at JAFCO Ventures. I work hands-on with company founders, helping to assemble world class teams, architect software products and roadmaps, and establish operational processes to build success from the beginning. Previously, I was a venture partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, VP Eng at Netscape, VP Eng at Collabra Software, VP Eng at Slate Software, and had key technical positions at Metaphor Computer Systems, Logitech, and Bell Laboratories. So, we've got someone who is a venture partner at JAFCO (a VC firm) who used to be with MDV (another VC firm) who is a Lift committer. Now, let me connect a couple of dots. Geoffrey Moore is a venture partner at MDV where Debby used to be a Venture partner. MDV also funded Cenzic. What do you think the chances are that I've at least heard of Crossing the Chasm? What are the chances I've read Crossing the Chasm? What are the chances that I've spent more than
[Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
Warren Henning wrote: tl;dr Want a cookie for your efforts? If you don't like Lift, don't use it. Problem solved. Hooray, turkey for everyone! There are few things sillier than investing time - serious time from lots of people - in a framework aimed at programmers and then treating detailed feedback from programmers this way. If you are not interested in feedback per se, then simply don't respond. If you disagree with the specifics, then discuss politely. Otherwise you are not just devaluing your own effort but that of other contributors by creating the impression that the community is unfriendly and immature. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27804300.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
[Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
Jeppe Nejsum Madsen wrote: Timothy Perrett timo...@getintheloop.eu writes: Sorry Jeppe, but I disagree. On which part :-) Maybe the not really into the visual aesthetics. What I meant was not that we don't care, but more that we will rather spend time on coding. The issue to date has been getting someone to work on it for free... The recession has worked against us here because people have been hand-to-mouth work wise, and couldn't spare time that wasn't paid for. Look at it this way: Committers work on the code for free and I guess that's also the case for many other OSS projects. Yet some still manage to create visually pleasing websites introduction material. I can only (perhaps falsely?) attribute this to the difference in focus/skills of the team. I actually come from a marketing / design background, and have tried to move this aspect of Lift along, but its been problematic with designers not committing and so forth. Lift needs a rebrand / restyle, yes, however, its easier said than done. My point exactly. If someone on the Lift community feels strong enough about this (and has the skills) it would move forward in the same way as the code...alas it doesn't, so we need to force it by trying to hire/manage someone external. /Jeppe -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en. Rebranding Lift wouldn't be about logos. They're irrelevant to a product aimed at programmers. You need to identify an occupy-able niche and then communicate your advantage in that niche to the right people. That means saying convincingly - Lift does X better than existing solutions - Here's why you should believe that and invest time - Here is how to get started And that X has to be very concrete. At the moment Lift's brand is It uses Scala, It has a reputation for being hard, and I don't know if anyone is really using it. You also have to kill the potential killer negatives - eg concerns that Lift will still be around in two or three years. I would also say that re-branding needs to happen *fast* before attention focuses on Grails - there is only so much new mindshare available at any time. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27804368.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
[Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
As this is likely to be very controversial, I'll recap one more time while my gf finishes dying her hair - - Don't ignore people like Mark. His feedback was detailed, thoughtful, and invaluable if want non-committers to use Lift - Do decide how you are going to position Lift. Position being about -- What can Lift do better than its rivals? -- Who should use it? Is it a master programmer's tool or accessible to the Drupal crowd? If inbetween, where exactly? Having done that then, rather than a new logo, I'd suggest writing a couple of articles about Lift that centre around above (Eg Lift is *the* tool for intermediate experienced Java programmers who need to deploy high performance sites that do X) and creating a new and thoroughly debugged new user guide. Get new users, sit them in front of a PC and watch what happens. Do not help them. Do make notes on what they do and say - and fix every problem that comes out this way. (I'd probably be willing to work on these things, although I expect the sentiment for lynching me will be stronger.) -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27805716.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
[Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
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. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27805572.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
[Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
Re. branding == What can you do for me, just compare the sites from Grails and Lift. Grails: Have your next Web 2.0 project done in weeks instead of months. Grails delivers a new age of Java web application productivity. - Ok, this is (claimed to be) a high productivity Web 2.0 framework. Get instant feedback, see instant results. Grails is the premier dynamic language web framework for the JVM. - So appeals to agile/TDDers. And no one is ever fired for choosing the JVM. Powered by Spring, Grails out performs the competition. - Based on established technology, reducing my risk. This is pretty good - if you're a Java guy looking to stay with the platform and get RoR productivity, or a RoR guy looking for more performance, either way you'll stay to here more and maybe do a google search to see what other people say. Lift: Lift is the only new framework in the last four years to offer fresh and innovative approaches to web development. It's not just some incremental improvements over the status quo, it redefines the state of the art. If you are a web developer, you should learn Lift. Even if you don't wind up using it everyday, it will change the way you approach web applications. - This is great to have on a CV. But as marketing material it is dismal. Yes, the designer of Lift must be smart - but what problem does Lift solve for me? And redefines the state of the art sounds like a lot to learn and Even if you don't wind up using it everyday sounds like you WON'T end up using it. Lift is an expressive and elegant framework for writing web applications. Lift stresses the importance of security, maintainability, scalability and performance, while allowing for high levels of developer productivity - If you throw much stuff at people at once they retain nothing. There is no focus. Especially when the claims are vague (expressive) and all-embracing. Lift borrows from the best of existing frameworks, providing Seaside's highly granular sessions and security Rails fast flash-to-bang Django's more than just CRUD is included Wicket's designer-friendly templating style (see Lift View First) - This is too easily read as Lift is very complicated. And We are technology obsessed rather than business problem focussed. So there go most programmers and virtually all their managers. (Btw - no one who wants to write highly granular anything should be allowed near the first page of a website for anything. Except possibly sand. Highly granular is NOT a benefit; a definite claim about the level of security provided and the credibility of the same would be.) The Grails site does everything right. It tells the reader if he is one of the people Grails is designed for, reassuring him that it is reasonable for him to invest more time. It tells him what Grails is good for, and it reduces his perception of risk. Time is money for developers; wasted time is wasted money - not just billable hours gone, but time that could have been invested in something that will keep them employed. But the promised benefit - RoR productvity, Java performance - is even more important than the reassurance about the cost. At the moment the Lift site doesn't promise anything at all - and it inadvertently hints at a very high cost. Buit I have heard worse - there's the story of a Xerox Parc guy who was asked whether the problem was that Xerox's marketing people tried to sell the steak instead of the sizzle. The steak? he asked, incredulously. If you'd given our guys steaks to sell they'd have advertised 'Electrically heated two week old dead meat..' -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27805956.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
Re: [Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 9:02 AM, jonathan mawson umpti...@gmail.com 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-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? You mistake different with harder. People who are used to one way to do things will find different harder than the same. In the case of view-first, there are plenty of posts as to why it's better. In the case of Maven, there are plenty of posts and discussions on that matter as well. More broadly, and I wish I had pointed this out to the OP, Lift projects are typically smaller than similar Rails projects. The couple of ports I've done, I've seen some substantive code reductions and significant test code reductions. And, what I've gotten in addition to a smaller code base is higher performance, more security, and more maintainability. So, Lift is in fact not 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-junkie-tp27802055p27805572.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comliftweb%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en. -- Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890 Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp Surf the harmonics -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
Re: [Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 9:19 AM, jonathan mawson umpti...@gmail.com wrote: As this is likely to be very controversial, I'll recap one more time while my gf finishes dying her hair - - Don't ignore people like Mark. His feedback was detailed, thoughtful, and invaluable if want non-committers to use Lift - Do decide how you are going to position Lift. Position being about -- What can Lift do better than its rivals? -- Who should use it? Is it a master programmer's tool or accessible to the Drupal crowd? If inbetween, where exactly? Having done that then, rather than a new logo, I'd suggest writing a couple of articles about Lift that centre around above (Eg Lift is *the* tool for intermediate experienced Java programmers who need to deploy high performance sites that do X) There are articles in the pipeline. and creating a new and thoroughly debugged new user guide. And where are the bugs in the existing user guide? Further, the complaint of the OP seem to be the formatting is ugly (okay, we can address this), I don't like Maven (this will change) I don't like markup in my code, except I do this implicitly in Rails (yeah... not much to talk about). Get new users, sit them in front of a PC and watch what happens. Do not help them. Do make notes on what they do and say - and fix every problem that comes out this way. (I'd probably be willing to work on these things, although I expect the sentiment for lynching me will be stronger.) -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27805716.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comliftweb%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en. -- Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890 Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp Surf the harmonics -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
Re: [Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 5:50 AM, jonathan mawson umpti...@gmail.com wrote: Jeppe Nejsum Madsen wrote: Timothy Perrett timo...@getintheloop.eu writes: Sorry Jeppe, but I disagree. On which part :-) Maybe the not really into the visual aesthetics. What I meant was not that we don't care, but more that we will rather spend time on coding. The issue to date has been getting someone to work on it for free... The recession has worked against us here because people have been hand-to-mouth work wise, and couldn't spare time that wasn't paid for. Look at it this way: Committers work on the code for free and I guess that's also the case for many other OSS projects. Yet some still manage to create visually pleasing websites introduction material. I can only (perhaps falsely?) attribute this to the difference in focus/skills of the team. I actually come from a marketing / design background, and have tried to move this aspect of Lift along, but its been problematic with designers not committing and so forth. Lift needs a rebrand / restyle, yes, however, its easier said than done. My point exactly. If someone on the Lift community feels strong enough about this (and has the skills) it would move forward in the same way as the code...alas it doesn't, so we need to force it by trying to hire/manage someone external. /Jeppe -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comliftweb%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en. Rebranding Lift wouldn't be about logos. They're irrelevant to a product aimed at programmers. You need to identify an occupy-able niche and then communicate your advantage in that niche to the right people. That means saying convincingly - Lift does X better than existing solutions - Here's why you should believe that and invest time - Here is how to get started And that X has to be very concrete. You mean: Lift stresses the importance of security, maintainability, scalability and performance, while allowing for high levels of developer productivity. At the moment Lift's brand is It uses Scala, It has a reputation for being hard, and I don't know if anyone is really using it. You also have to kill the potential killer negatives - eg concerns that Lift will still be around in two or three years. This is more of a concern about Scala in general. Every available metric points to the fact that Lift has reached critical mass. Our community is larger than Wicket's. Our code velocity is faster than Wicket's. Etc. The bigger issue that I've heard from the corporate adoption side is will Scala be around in 2 years? I would also say that re-branding needs to happen *fast* before attention focuses on Grails - there is only so much new mindshare available at any time. Every Grails vs. Lift bake-off I've been involved, Lift has won hands down. Once you do Ajax or Comet, Lift wins. Once you try to scale, Lift wins. More generally, ever Java shop that's adopted Groovy and then Scala has dumped Groovy. The advantage that Groovy/Grails has is SpringSource/VMWare. But actual adoption is waning (just look at Tiobe). There will be an answer to the corporate types looking for support on Lift and Scala in the next few weeks. -- View this message in context: http://old.nabble.com/superficial-first-impressions-from-a-rails-junkie-tp27802055p27804368.html 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 lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.comliftweb%2bunsubscr...@googlegroups.com . For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en. -- Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890 Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp Surf the harmonics -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
[Lift] Re: [lift] superficial first impressions from a rails junkie
On Mar 6, 10:06 am, David Pollak feeder.of.the.be...@gmail.com wrote: And where are the bugs in the existing user guide? The only outright bug is that you can't copy paste the second maven invocation and the fix is extremely non-obvious. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups Lift group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
