I've had very similar feelings using enlive in Clojure land. I doubt I'll be switching back to a more traditional templating engine any time soon.
I agree. View first rocks!
Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#12What I hate in these company blogs - there seems to be no way to go to the actual company site... I always end up editing the address bar and removing "blog." prefix by hand...
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#13Many of the same advantages (and some additional ones, no doubt) hold for the Haskell web frameworks, with the added benefit of using Haskell.
I'm in no position to say whether Yesod or Lift is better; I just wish more people would consider Haskell at all--it's a great choice for web programming (among many other things).
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#14Apologies if this is nit-picky, but...
Some of the main points are weak and don't really apply to differentiating Lift specifically. For example, the fact that Lift is Scala-based doesn't make it any different than Symfony is PHP-based or Spring MVC is Java-based. Subjective, but I definitely understand that that this is an opinionated view (rather than a objective "Lift has Feature X" viewpoint).
Similarly, what server-side framework that's in wide usage nowadays doesn't have the ability to have some form of generated/dynamic JS wiring? I'd say that's table stakes nowadays, not something to callout by any means.
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#15I tried to like Lift, but it's so woefully documented that I can't. At the moment I've gone back to Wicket (which is fantastic on many of these, particularly building a page out of component objects rather than bunging lots of stuff in a page controller, and has an even better way of doing bindings than lift does), even though it doesn't fit perfectly with Scala.
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#16The sever side statefulness of Lift, the fact that it supposes I don't know how to program HTML/JavaScript, and the hostility toward Scala that Lift's creator harbors since negotiations with him joining Typesafe broke down, are all reasons I think it would behoove anyone to avoid the framework. Play, unfiltered, scalatra, and blue eyes are all fantastic
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#17This is OT, but you really should track clicks on links (if you need to do it in the first place) in a different way than this: my first encounter with Lift
It's easy to do this with a jquery post - just bind to the click event, and post the tracking data to whatever URL you want as a separate async action, without getting in the way of the user.
You should never put js in the href like this, or insert extra referral links prior to going to the real link as google have been doing recently; it breaks the web.
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#18The sever side statefulness of Lift, the fact that it supposes I don't know how to program HTML/JavaScript, and the hostility toward Scala that Lift's creator harbors since negotiations with him joining Typesafe broke down, are all reasons I think it would behoove anyone to avoid the framework. Play, unfiltered, scalatra, and blue eyes are all fantastic
> The sever side statefulness of Lift
Having been using lift professionally for the last year or so, this is definitely my biggest complaint. I feel like Lift got it wrong here -- the *Var model is just hard to reason about. Our app has a lot of complicated logic to save and restore state at the appropriate times, and this model is supposedly the Right Way to do things.
> the fact that it supposes I don't know how to program HTML/JavaScript
Not sure why you say that; I've never gotten this feeling.
> the hostility toward Scala that Lift's creator harbors
Lift has 50 committers now. It's not going anywhere. If dickead maintainers were a real problem, nobody would be using glibc anymore. (I don't have any thoughts on whether DPP is a dickhead; I do think Drepper is, though :-)
One thing you didn't mention is the whole CssSel model combined with the way lift does templating. I think it's awesome, and hopefully I'll never have to work with another style of templating again in my life. (In fact, I wrote an implementation of it in haskell for my personal static site generator, because I love it so much: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hquery ).
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#19I've had very similar feelings using enlive in Clojure land. I doubt I'll be switching back to a more traditional templating engine any time soon.
I'm very happy with Hiccup, I think both paradigms are better than the more common ERB style templating. Either pure Clojure (or whateverlanguage) or pure HTML rather than a mix.
I wish Clojure had a batteries included framework like this just to draw more attention to the language.
Re: Why Lift is My Favorite Web Framework
#20Regardless of the technical qualities of Lift, its future is pretty uncertain with 1) dpp leaving the project (in pretty bad terms) a few months ago and 2) Typesafe choosing Play over Lift for its stack.
I would definitely not pick Lift today for a new project.