Play as a part of Typesafe stack, what is Lift's answer?

[Oleg Galako]

I'm using Lift for more than a year now. Yes, i tried to get into it three or more times before that, Lift was hard to me to start with.

But today it is a very handy tool in my toolset and i'm worried about its future.

So what position should Lift take after the news?

[Aaron@Latiz]

I'm curious about this as well. I looked around for insight as to the
motivation behind TypeSafe's decision but couldn't find anything.
Maybe Virginia is mad because Scala is hard?

[Timothy Perrett]

Oleg,

Remember that typesafe is one company, its not the entire Scala ecosystem. They are certainly doing great, work, and i commend those guys, but remember the ecosystem is far bigger and that there are many things that go into making a community diverse and robust. 

Specifically with regard to Play, its one possible solution. It's key to remember that there is no panacea, no silver bullet, no one size fits all. Lift has its strengths and weaknesses, as does Play. Irrespective of the product or thing you are looking at, one should always look to see if its a good fit for solving the problem you have - sometimes that will be Lift, sometimes it might be Play, but sometimes else it might be raw Netty. My point is that the typesafe-play relationship does not really change anything... people should still be evaluating their needs and use cases and if they need commercial support, there are plenty of people on this mailing list who can help you when it comes to Lift. 

Relax. Lift is not going anywhere. If anything, I would anticipate the scala-web field becoming more diverse over the next couple of years, not less. 

Cheers, Tim

[Lukasz Kuczera]

Play is closer to Java developers than Scala, it might be the reason,
but I think David had a conversation with Typesafe and he didn't join
them at some point this might be more "political" as well but those
are only my own thoughts out of hat.

[Peter Petersson]

This is how Martin Odersky put it on twitter
Quote:
"Welcome to @playframework 2.0 as part of the new @typesafe stack!
It's a perfect fit for our "Working hard to keep it Simple" philosophy."
end quote

No doubt that having all the good peps at typesafe backing up the Play framework will have positive impact on it but Lift will stand on its own merit, non the less there is a lot we as a community can do to promote Lift and make it even more "Different * Real * Awesome" as well as "keep it simple".

Trying to keep it simple for newcomers to get started and finding out the awesomeness and the most resent (best practise) ways to do things in Lift is IMHO essential for maintaining a growing community at least until it reaches a "critical mass" of users (after that other things may govern).
Coming from a many years of Java (JEE) background with less than 6 month of Scala knowledge finding my way to Lift has been a bumpy but rewarding road and I am sure I am on the right track having chosen to dig into Lift:s ecosystem.      

David, Indrajit, Timothy, Derek... and the rest of the Lift devs are doing a awesome job on pushing lift forward and in the direction the community wish, having said that there is a lot of public docs and code (read wiki/github/api/demos/blogs....) out there that needs our love, input and support non the least to prevent newcomers from getting lost reading old and outdated information ... with this we can all help out.

best regards
   Peter Petersson

[Stuart Watt]

On 2011-11-16, at 10:20 AM, Timothy Perrett wrote:

> Relax. Lift is not going anywhere. If anything, I would anticipate the scala-web field becoming more diverse over the next couple of years, not less.

As a Perler and (still novice) Lifter, multiple web frameworks can work well. Perl has three main ones, Catalyst, Dancer, and Mojolicious, and a few others which are less well-known. Each has strengths and weaknesses, often relating to conceptual familiarity and skill availability, more than any conceptual or technical differences. Most companies would adopt one and stick with it, usually because it made resourcing easier than anything else. Interestingly, the increased competition between them perhaps pushed documentation and community support even more than technical development. That can be good for everyone.

All the best
Stuart

[Tyler Weir]

>> So what position should Lift take after the news?

Same as before, keep on improving.  

[IL]

If I moved to Play! next time, it must be I need WebSocket!!

I want WebSocket NOW! Baby!

Best wishes,

IL

[JK de Veyra]

I think Lift Web Framework still lacks those expected features found on most web frameworks. Website makeover to provide better tutorials and documentations; the philosophy of agile development, promoting test driven development; a more productive and faster project life-cycle; better error reporting and more. The basic idea is to define "Best Web Framework." I'm looking forward these cool stuff, if you get what I mean, on the next versions of the Lift Web Framework.

- JK

[Tyler Weir]

"I think Lift Web Framework still lacks those expected features found on most web frameworks."

What are we missing?

[David Pollak]

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 12:05 PM, Tyler Weir wrote:

>> So what position should Lift take after the news?

Same as before, keep on improving.  

This pretty much sums it up for me.

Lift is a web framework that makes Seven Things (http://seventhings.liftweb.net/ ) easy that most other web frameworks can't do or do poorly.  Comet and Ajax and Security have been a part of Lift since the very early days of the project.  For developers that need these things, Lift is far and away the best choice.  We in Lift-land prize good community and technical excellence and focus on those core values.  We will continue to do so.

The Lift community and Lift user base continues to grow as it has for the last 4+ years.  The folks who have adopted Lift, who have seen the value in Lift's differences, often explain it better than I can (see http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/lift-guardian ).  Lift will continue to improve and continue to grow and some relationship of convenience cannot change that.

 

--
Lift, the simply functional web framework: http://liftweb.net
Code: http://github.com/lift
Discussion: http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb
Stuck? Help us help you: https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/liftweb/Posting_example_code

[Tyler Weir]

Websockets are not yet ratified.

While a few browsers "support" WebSockets, many don't and there are differences between them.

As DPP has said previously, Lift will support WebSockets when they are a standard. 

To do so now is folly.

[Sander Mak]

I agree that adding support now is cumbersome and requires more effort
than when it would be a standard. But let's remember that HTML5 is not
a standard either (and will not be for quite a while), yet Lift caters
to that crowd through the excellent designer-friendly templates et
cetera. So while I don't disagree, I find the argument below to be a
bit unsatisfactory.

[AaronA]

The framework itself is insanely amazing and I learn of it's capabilities more and more every day I code in it.

I very much wish I could share in detail the cool things we are doing with Lift and _kinda_ will.

As an overhead view of what we're doing is we're managing 200,000 - 1,000,000 Printed Greeting Cards that have 100% variable data on each piece, across 6 Xerox IGen4 Printers. We use Lift to process, print, and keep track of each printed piece from building the card data all the way through our production process such as printing, cutting, creasing, stuffing into an envelope, scanning a barcode to print correct address information, and finally to keep track of stats per each print operator so they can bloat on how much more prints they've done then the other guy/gal. There is a lot of validation and barcode scanning going on which each station is connected to a Lift page that contains a Comet component to act like a typical desktop application.

The combination of Ajax and Comet as well as using JSON to communicate to each of our printers(ripservers) has been so easy to do because of Lift. And all of our big printing operation is completely centered around Lift.

It's been the ultimate printing and tracking dashboard and it's easily moving our business further with higher end quality.

Even if Play becomes more popular, as long as Scala is still around I'll be using Lift and continue teaching it at the Users Groups around my area.

I think the problem with the documentation is once you start ACTUALLY playing with Lift you'll be so caught up in it's Awesomeness that you'll not have a lot of time to do a lot of documentation.

With a framework like Play! it's not as big as a tool. Not to diss it or anything since I've used it a lot as well. Like for my Grandma's website lawls *hides*.

Anyhow I don't see Lift falling off anytime soon. Great work guys and thank you big time for such an awesome and dreamy framework. ^_^

-Aaron A

[David Pollak]

Unless there's a compelling use case, Lift will not support WebSockets until they are standard and there is reasonable server support for them.

What's the use case for WebSockets?  How do they solve problems that cannot be solved in any other way?  

[Tyler Weir]

AaronA, sounds awesome!

[Chenguang He]

I used lift nearly 1 year, it is still hard to me. But more i use, more i feel it has good potential value.

Good luck lift

Chenguang He

[Kevin]

My background is I am a newbie for web dev trying to build a highly
functional social app over the past 6 months (13 hours a day average x
7 days). At the beginning I have to deal with db, html markups and
container and etc. This is a different concept to JavaSwing and etc. I
think this experience is necessary for learning to code any web app.
Some may interpret it as hard or "hard to me to start with." Perhaps,
people with MVC background may find Lift foreign for a short-while.
This foreign experience give ones a powerful alternative to the
current practice.

Lift has many resources to enable one to be a quick-starter (wiki,
open source books and Lift in action and the very helpful and gracious
community). Without those elements, I would call it very hard for a
person like me. But it seems, after few years of dedicated development
in Lift, most of the things I need can be derived directly from those
resources and I am quite satisfy with the speed of writing in scala
and Lift and cleanliness of code and power that Lift (scala) has
enabled me to develop app. To some websocket/typesafe may be
important. To me, Lift is quite enough for our app and I wouldn't want
to change to other frameworks because of few advance features
irrelevant to me and before I learn about its imperfections.

[JK de Veyra]

It might be an overstatement, but what I really mean are those features that would complete the puzzle to the so called "Best Web Framework," Honestly I'm new on this domain. Around 6 months Scala and 4 months web development with Yii web framework, but I'm having hard time starting up with this environment. More specifically how to get started. If you try to compare the Lift's website from Yii looking at a web developer standpoint, I would find lots of information about their framework without jumping in to a different website. Their tutorials, wikis, references and their community are built in inside their framework website. It's very obvious they put a lot of effort polishing their site and I think it's something that should not be overlooked on the near future. I hope you get what I mean.

- JK

[Eduardo M. Cavalcanti]

Hi,
I have been using Lift for some time and I really had to struggle to
learn how to do some stuff, but now I feel it was well worth the effort.
A problem, I think, is that in Lift books, Wiki, maillist explanations
there are many idioms that are particular to Lift/Scala whose
understanding is taken for granted on the part of the explainer, but
takes some time for someone with java background to grasp, even for
someone that has studied a deal of Scala books/documentation.
For example, from LiftBoot.scala:
LiftRules.setSiteMap(SiteMap(entries: _*))

What the heck : _* means? Well, it means entries, that is a List, will
be expanded as parameters to setSiteMap. The explanation is in
"Programming in Scala".

Of course if I asked for this on the mailist someone would kindly
answer, but sometimes the doubts are so many that someone gets
overwhelmed. Anyway, most of the information is already on the maillist,
books and Wiki. And Lift community is extremely helpful.
Cheers.

[Mads Hartmann Jensen]

> What the heck : _* means? Well, it means entries, that is a List, will be expanded as parameters to setSiteMap. The explanation is in "Programming in Scala".

Heh, this specific information is actually also in the wiki http://www.assembla.com/spaces/liftweb/wiki/SiteMap#sitemap

So we are doing our best to make the existing documentation available to people with non-scala backgrounds :)

[Andreas Joseph Krogh]

I don't want to sound rude but none of the (web)frameworks I've used care to explain the programming language (except if there's some serious foo going on). Do we really want to go down that roud? Where does it end?

Answering specific questions on this list, yes, but explaining Scala on the wiki/tutorials - I'm not sure...

--
Andreas Joseph Krogh <and...@officenet.no> - mob: +47 909 56 963
Senior Software Developer / CTO - OfficeNet AS - http://www.officenet.no
Public key: http://home.officenet.no/~andreak/public_key.asc

[Ján Raska]

On Nov 18, 2011, at 9:11 , Andreas Joseph Krogh wrote:

> I don't want to sound rude but none of the (web)frameworks I've used care to explain the programming language (except if there's some serious foo going on). Do we really want to go down that roud? Where does it end?

I agree with you partially, indeed none of the Java frameworks explain the language itself, but on the other hand, those frameworks are based on a well known language. I've used Struts, Stripes and Wicket before, and since all of them are Java-based, and since I've been quite solid Java programmer, my issues and troubles with learning those frameworks were not about language understanding.

But in case of Lift, I believe that quite many people try out Scala just because of Lift. I might be wrong but this was my case, a colleague of mine found Lift and because it seemed promising to us, we started to learn both Lift and Scala at once. And it's much harder to learn a framework when you're a beginner with the language too, there were moments I wished Scala just didn't exist :)

>
> Answering specific questions on this list, yes, but explaining Scala on the wiki/tutorials - I'm not sure...
>
> --
> Andreas Joseph Krogh <and...@officenet.no> - mob: +47 909 56 963
> Senior Software Developer / CTO - OfficeNet AS - http://www.officenet.no
> Public key: http://home.officenet.no/~andreak/public_key.asc
>

[Aditya Vishwakarma]

Hi all

Some background, we are a startup based in India working on a comet based web app. We were initially trying out various webstacks, JEE, Python (tornado), Ruby (RoR) but they don't make the cut. I don't like programming enterprise level apps in scripting language ( type safety is a feature!) but JEE is too cumbersome to develop a rapidly changing app. When we came across lift and scala we chose to go with it because it solves all the modern web problems in the right way. Lift lends itself to SOFEA very well.

While we also faced problems as we were learning both scala and lift at same time, the team has the opinion that scala is very nicely explained on many books while Lift isn't. It has been 2 months and we have more or less mastered scala but still struggling with lift. It seems that beginner documentation is easily available on net, but trying to do something remotely advanced and we have no idea as on how to proceed. We feel that rather than explaining the scala part of it, we should focus more on documenting more advanced use cases. From top of my head, I can see these issues.

• most of Lift's inbuilt snippets are hardly explained. and since they have no scaladocs, we have no idea on what all they can accomplish and how to tweak them. case in point : http://simply.liftweb.net/index-Chapter-9.html is totally empty.
• Comet Actors are never explained in any of the books. they just make a test chat, which modifies DOM and end the chapter. Any advanced usecase and one is stuck. Infact, the most useful info on CometActors is on the blog of Diego Medina. I own him huge thanks. However, I am still looking for info on how to create comets through code.
  
• jsonCall / ajaxCall seem to be powerful(?) No idea what they do, and how they do it. I feel that Ajax/Comet is Lift's strength and they should be explained properly.

You can see that most of my issues is with the Lift is Comet/Ajax not being explained properly. I feel that comet/Ajax is lift's strength and it should get more focus. Its new to most people and hence requires great explanation then other stuff.

Great Framework though
Aditya

[Diego Medina]

>
> most of Lift's inbuilt snippets are hardly explained. and since they have no
> scaladocs, we have no idea on what all they can accomplish and how to tweak
> them. case in point : http://simply.liftweb.net/index-Chapter-9.html is
> totally empty.

> the most useful info on CometActors is on the blog of
> Diego Medina. I own him huge thanks. However, I am still looking for info on

I'm glad you find them useful, and I guess it shows that you don't
have to be a committer to make a difference, everyone on the Lift
community can contribute to the wiki or write blog post about the
things they do with Lift and that will also help others looking for
information. I also find the Comet and Ajax support in Lift
fascinating and will continue to explore it more and try to contribute
what I learn along the way.

And like others have said, we don't have to worry that Typesafe did
not endorse Lift, there are a lot of users out there using Lift,
small, medium and large sites, we have a very good foundation and we
will all continue to drive Lift forward.

One thing that now benefits Play is that they have official commercial
support (well, they had that before, in a way, but similar to how
David has his own company). Maybe it is time to add a wiki page with
the names of people offering lift commercial support (I know there was
a thread a few days ago). So we can point people to that lift.

Regards,

Diego

--
Diego Medina
Web Developer
di...@fmpwizard.com
http://www.fmpwizard.com

[Timothy Perrett]

Hi there,

While we also faced problems as we were learning both scala and lift at same time, the team has the opinion that scala is very nicely explained on many books while Lift isn't.

Are you reading Lift in Action? If not, I would like you to look at that. Many people have found it to be "the missing documentation" (someone else's words not mine).

 

It has been 2 months and we have more or less mastered scala but still struggling with lift. It seems that beginner documentation is easily available on net, but trying to do something remotely advanced and we have no idea as on how to proceed. We feel that rather than explaining the scala part of it, we should focus more on documenting more advanced use cases. From top of my head, I can see these issues.

[...]

You can see that most of my issues is with the Lift is Comet/Ajax not being explained properly. I feel that comet/Ajax is lift's strength and it should get more focus. Its new to most people and hence requires great explanation then other stuff.

As above really. The rock-paper-scissors development in LIA has also had praise. 

[David Pollak]

-- 

David Pollak

Sent with Sparrow

On Friday, November 18, 2011 at 6:23 AM, Diego Medina wrote:

most of Lift's inbuilt snippets are hardly explained. and since they have no

scaladocs, we have no idea on what all they can accomplish and how to tweak

them. case in point : http://simply.liftweb.net/index-Chapter-9.html is

totally empty.

the most useful info on CometActors is on the blog of

Diego Medina. I own him huge thanks. However, I am still looking for info on

I'm glad you find them useful, and I guess it shows that you don't

have to be a committer to make a difference, everyone on the Lift

community can contribute to the wiki or write blog post about the

things they do with Lift and that will also help others looking for

information. I also find the Comet and Ajax support in Lift

fascinating and will continue to explore it more and try to contribute

what I learn along the way.

And like others have said, we don't have to worry that Typesafe did

not endorse Lift

Just to set the record straight, I declined an invitation to work with TypeSafe (no, I will not discuss the reasons, not even privately, so don't even ask).  The lack of endorsement is from me to TypeSafe, not from TypeSafe to Lift.

[penny]

I am a lift newbie. I have a background in jee, erlang, webobjects. My
next project is going to be about writing an application with a lot of
ajax calls but at the same time trying to be as secure as possible. I
did my research and webobjects and seaside came the closest to only
these two requirements. But that was before i checked lift. Now i have
been amazed by simplylift. The doc might be incomplete but most of the
stuffs are there and there are a lot of good stuffs, specially for
people who have been dealing with strange web development
methodologies for some time. I have the feeling that lift is the real
deal. Just my 2 cents.

On 16 Nov., 13:01, Oleg Galako <ojo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'm using Lift for more than a year now. Yes, i tried to get into it three
> or more times before that, Lift was hard to me to start with.
> But today it is a very handy tool in my toolset and i'm worried about its
> future.
>

[Ramses Morales]

On Friday, November 18, 2011 6:57:16 AM UTC-8, Timothy Perrett wrote:

Are you reading Lift in Action? If not, I would like you to look at that. Many people have found it to be "the missing documentation" (someone else's words not mine).

 

+1

Lift is the most abstract web framework I have ever used, which is great for development once you know the concepts. Lift in Action helped me get there fast, it *is* the missing documentation.

[Ben Phelan]

 
On Friday, November 18, 2011 3:23:01 PM UTC+1, fmpwizard wrote:

One thing that now benefits Play is that they have official commercial
support (well, they had that before, in a way, but similar to how
David has his own company). Maybe it is time to add a wiki page with
the names of people offering lift commercial support (I know there was
a thread a few days ago). So we can point people to that lift.

Yep, I'll finish putting something together in a week or so, unless someone else does it first.  Note that although there are many high-quality Lift consulting services AFAIK there's still no-one offering SLA-backed commercial Lift support.

-

Ben

[David Whittaker]

Not all of our contracts include an SLA, but Iradix does offer that as an option.  We host on hardware that we own located in a SAS 70 type II data center and are certainly willing to provide an SLA for Lift projects that we develop and host.

--

[David Pollak]

I'd like to see a "Commercial Support" page on liftweb.net

What do folks think?

--

Visi.Pro, Cloud Computing for the Rest of Us http://visi.pro

Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net

Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp
Blog: http://goodstuff.im

[Diego Medina]

On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 12:03 PM, David Pollak
<feeder.of...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I'd like to see a "Commercial Support" page on liftweb.net
>
> What do folks think?

That would be great!

Diego

--

[Ben Phelan]

Yep, I did volunteer to put that wiki page together, I've just been drowning under mountains of work recently.  Someone else could get started based on the contents of the other thread.  I also received a bunch of private replies and I need to chase those up to see whether they're interested in being listed.

Good to know about Iradix, thanks David!

[Andreas Joseph Krogh]

On 11/29/2011 06:03 PM, David Pollak wrote:

I'd like to see a "Commercial Support" page on liftweb.net

What do folks think?

+100

[Manuel Medina González]

Probably a bit out of subject:

In my case, when I accepted my current job I knew I was going to be working with Scala, but not with Lift. On the very first day they asked me to do a "Twitter clone" as test. I struggled as I didn't know Scala, and as I had to go directly to Lift, it was hard to understand what was happening (I also came from 9 years of Java programming, and the only web framework I had used so far was Django (Python)).

After I finished that (took me a week or so), I started working on some NLP stuff using only Scala for 2 months. That helped me to understand the language better. Later on, I was asked to do a demo of the stuff I was working in, either on console or on a web page; I decided to do it in Lift as a challenge to myself. When I reopened the Twitter clone project and started to read the documentation again, many things I didn't get at that time started to make sense.

Although I agree that there are some parts of the documentation that could be better (need to read "Lift in Action"), I don't think Lift documentation should include documentation or explanations about programming in Scala. 

Just my 2 cents. There are still so many things I need to read and understand, but I like Lift :)

[AGYNAMIX Torsten Uhlmann]

Absolutely.

It's not so much a driver for startups or small companies, but I think it's one crucial element for a wider adoption in the corporate space.

A few years back (well, maybe 10, I can't remember), my client wouldn't allow Perl to be used on it's Unix machines because it is open source and had no commercial support (it had, but not widespread). I'm glad that attitude has changed...

-- 

AGYNAMIX(R). Passionate Software.
Inh. Torsten Uhlmann | Buchenweg 5 | 09380 Thalheim
Phone:       +49 3721 273445
Fax:             +49 3721 273446
Mobile:       +49 151 12412427
Web:           http://www.agynamix.de

[Sander Mak]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Tyler Weir <tyler...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Websockets are not yet ratified.

Well looks like the web got an early Christmas present:
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/ietf-announce/current/msg09663.html

[IL]

Cool!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

IL