Lift has always had the best server-push technology around. Why? It's secure, it deals well with spotty connections, it respects the limited number of HTTP connections between the client and the server, and so much more.
Angular JS is a very exciting UI package that makes building dynamic single-page applications a snap because there's a 2-way binding between the model and the UI so that changes in the model are correctly reflected in the UI. And the whole binding is declarative so that once you use a model item in the UI, that part of the UI is always updated when the model changes.
Lift is growing and evolving.
I've just started the Lift 3.0 code branch. Lift 3.0 will be based on Scala 2.10+ and will use features exclusive to 2.10 including macros. Lift 3.0 will also cut away at a lot of cruft that's grown onto Lift over the years, so 3.0 will have a bunch of breaking changes.
Lift 3.0 will support Futures (specifically LAFutures which are Lift's time-tested, solid Futures) such that you can do stuff like this in a REST call:
object DelayedRest extends RestHelper {
serve {
case "delay" :: Nil Get _ =>
LAFuture(() => {
Thread.sleep(2000)
<b>Hello</b>})
}
}
From the beginning of the Lift project, Lift has had a very well defined and restrictive Intellectual Property (IP) policy. All code in the various Lift repositories was created exclusively by committers who signed an IP assignment agreement (we adopted the Plone IP assignment.) All Lift code was created exclusively by the committers and the copyright in such code was assigned to an entity that holds the Lift copyrights.
The RedHat OpenShift folks are making it super-simple to deploy a Lift app.
The Escalante project provides an amazingly simple way to deploy a Lift app.
Basically, just write you Lift app with a Maven POM file, git-push the app to OpenShift and in a few minutes, you app is live.
I built a simple Lift/Escalante app.
Basically, I followed the instructions and then I added the code for a simple chat app.
OpenShift and Escalante just work with Lift. Thanks for Galder for creating Escalante and lowering to barriers to entry for Lift.
This was the question I had about 3 years ago. I think I used Scala for about 3 months before I heard about Lift. And because I always liked web development, I figured this was a good way to learn Scala.
Fast forward to today, I left my job at Oracle/MySQL and joined Elemica, so I could work full time using Lift and become a Lift committer. I'm one of the most active members in the community, by participating on the mailing list, as well as writing about Lift.
Six more recipes added to the Lift Cookbook this month:
...bringing the total to 62 recipes.
The cookbook is a growing resource for Lift developers, presenting programming solutions to a range of specific questions. Follow @LiftCookbook for updates as they happen.
It was five years ago that I founded the Lift Web Framework project.
At that time, the Scala community was very small and academically focused. Lift was one of the first external libraries for Scala and Lift is now the venerable, longest-lived external library in the Scala ecosystem.
The Lift community has grown to over 3,000 people and more than 50 committers. There are multiple books on Lift and hundreds of sites built on Lift.