Financial enterprise app in Lift

[Americo Vargas]

Bolivia has a long and well recognized tradition in micro-credit, a
sector of the finance industry oriented to lending to the poor (which
is good for the poor and also for the finance organizations, because,
as it turns out, poor people are good payers). The software support,
however, shows its age: most micro credit institutions in Bolivia use
software developed more than 20 years ago with the technology
available at the time.

So, I decided to found a start-up for developing an enterprise
application for micro-credit organizations that puts the software
technology support at the level of the finance technology. The
background of our team includes developing in Haskell for fun and in
Java to make for a living. Thus, knowing Scala and falling in love
with it, were one and the same thing. Almost immediately after that,
we had another revelation: Lift. Using these powerful tools we are
just now finishing a very general, highly parameterized, accounting
module that will be the hub of our micro-credit system.

Our 3-people team was able to do very quickly some quite interesting
work. Tatiana wrote a module for managing menu structures and profiles
from database records, fully integrated with Lift’s security support.
To do that, she had prompt and kind help from the Lift community,
including help from David Pollack himself. Now we can modify our menu
structure on the fly as our app evolves. As writing the SQL to fill
the tables is a little painstaking, we are developing a more
expressive external DSL for that purpose (in Scala, of course). Juan
Jose wrote some input screens that make use of JavaScript to ease the
interaction with the user. Using such a dangerous language with the
static safety we attained would have been impossible without Lift’s
support for it. Some of our input screens make calculations based on
data previously entered by the user. To compile arithmetic expressions
we use an internal DSL shamelessly stolen from David’s book on Scala.
The combinator-based parser generates an AST based on case classes.
Evaluating the ASTs is a breeze; my fingers outnumber the necessary
LOC.
What I described and much, much more, took us just 4 months. I can’t
even imagine achieving something like that without Lift. Our
experience with Lift was the best possible, and an important part of
that was having Scala available within the framework. No other
language could have allowed us to do what we did within such a short
time frame, Ruby included.

I think that Lift has a great potential in the enterprise applications
area and hope that the fantastic Lift team will continue supporting
enterprise application developers as it has been doing, favoring at
the same time all other kinds of webapp developers, including those
coming from Rails.

Thanks a lot and best luck with your new endeavors,

[Peter Robinett]

Congratulations, Americo, it sounds like your startup has a fantastic and very needed app. Will you have any sort of publicly-facing website that we can check out?

Cheers,

Peter

[David Pollak]

Wow... this is an exciting story.  Can I post it to the Lift web site?  Do you have any URLs for your service?  Is any of your code open source?

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Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net
Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890
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[Americo Vargas]

Hi David,

Many thanks for your interest in our work. Of course, if you consider
appealing the story you can post it to the Lift web site, and please
feel free to adapt it in content, size, and style in the way you see
more convenient. There is, however, one caveat. We are still
developing the application, and at the moment we don’t have any
descriptive material available. A few weeks ago we got our first
customer for the accounting subsystem, the first we delivered, and we
are now working hard on developing the remaining ones. We plan to have
the entire system ready for deployment by the end of April, which is
when we’ll have to find some sales people to keep things going on.
Until that time we should also be able to write some nice user
documentation and start at least a basic website with information
about the system. We have also to apply i18n, something that with
Lift’s support won’t be really an issue, but anyway … Right now
everything is in Spanish.

As to our possible contribution to the Lift community in the form of
some open source code, your message gave me an idea. We have this Lift
code that, based on some DB contents (to be filled writing a script in
an external DSL), and using just one line of application-specific code
in boot.scala, can generate (through a Maven archetype? right now we
do that by copy – paste) a skeleton app with login screen and start
page with menus, and a complete administrative app to add profiles
(with visual selection of options), users, and relationships between
them. The stuff is not yet dressed up for external use, but with some
code cleanup and generalization it could be so. What do you think? I
can send you some screenshots to help you assess if the initiative
would be worth the extra work.

Thanks again and best regards,

Américo



On Jan 12, 11:53 pm, David Pollak <feeder.of.the.be...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Wow... this is an exciting story.  Can I post it to the Lift web site?  Do
> you have any URLs for your service?  Is any of your code open source?
>

> > liftweb+u...@googlegroups.com<liftweb%2Bunsu...@googlegroups.com>
> > .

> > For more options, visit this group at
> >http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en.
>
> --
> Lift, the simply functional web frameworkhttp://liftweb.net

> Beginning Scalahttp://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890

[Americo Vargas]

Thanks, Peter, unfortunately right now we are still too busy doing
development and we don't have any descriptive material available. But
in a couple of months we will, and then I'll certainly post you a link
here.

Cheers,
Américo

[Naftoli Gugenheim]

Sounds like a great Lift Module!

[Peter Robinett]

Seconded! If I understand you correctly the code is somewhat like Django Admin? If so a module would be a huge win for Lift, both in improving developer productivity and in marketing Lift (I know the the admin site is huge plus for many people considering Django). And even if it's not, it sounds exciting.

Peter