> Having html and javascript inside my scala classes gives me a queasy feeling.Yeah that's an interesting tradeoff. I like it because it helps keep code completely out of the html templates, which is a design goal of lift. I tend to work with designers who do HTML/CSS only, not javascript, and I do the backend Scala and frontend Javascript, so that separation of roles works. But if your dev team (as most big ones do) consists of frontend HMTL/CSS designers, frontend Javascript UX devs, and backend devs, then that architecture may not be optimal.
> I also think Lift is dead.
Far from it.
> The creator of the project left
Not exactly:
1. He's still a core committer,
2. Advised the founders of Lift Co. [1] - commercial support/SLA for lift projects,
3. Is active on the Lift group [2] (the activity takes place there and at Assembla [3], not Twitter)
4. Continues to present about [4], blog about [5][6], and advocate Lift [7].
5. Even holds personal office hours every week in San Francisco to support Lift devs, for free. He's just not doing direct commercial consulting on Lift anymore, others have grabbed that torch and are running with it, primarily in SF, London, and India.
> the documentation isn't great,
True, but improving. The new book from Manning, Lift In Action [8] is excellent. You can buy it from Manning, or obtain it by other means. There are completely free options as well [9].
> View first model isn't popular
Popular is not necessarily better [10], unfortunately. However, if you grok view first and still believe MVC is better, Lift also includes an MVC version [11] for you.
> very little activity in #lift,
The meat of the discussion is on the google group [2], not Twitter. (And it's #liftweb anyway, but admittedly not much difference there either).
> very little activity in the lift framework google group.
Maybe you're comparing to a mega project like Rails, or maybe you accidentally mistook the stickies at the top for the actual group activity, but there's more than 'very little activity' in the group.
Granted, Lift isn't without issues. Getting started via Maven is painful (Pro-tip: use SBT + Lifty [12]). It has a non-trivial learning curve (I actually had to learn Haskell in order to grok Scala in order to use Lift - all worth it - though people coming from the ML family may have an easier ramp-up); has to deal with Scala's versioning and dependency issues (which David Pollack ticked off the Scala community by vocally complaining about, and which SBT does a decent job of mitigating), and does most things differently than the norm.
However, it's a superb piece of technology more than worth the effort to learn. It's more inherently secure than any other framework out there, enables a simple architecture (3-tier only, web/app/db, no caching layers), is relatively easily scalable (just add more instances to whichever layer you need to scale), does Ajax and Comet better than anything else, is very productive once you know it (minimal code, no testing necessary for classes of errors the type system or compiler catch), and lots of other excellent stuff [13].
It's evolving, maybe not at the pace of Rails, but it's starting with a far stronger technical architecture, runtime, and Java ecosystem interopability.
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1. http://liftweb.com/
2. http://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!forum/liftweb
3. http://assembla.com/wiki/show/liftweb/
4. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Exploring-Composition-and...
5. http://lift.la/
6. http://goodstuff.im/
7. http://visi.io/ (see comments on Lift)
8. http://manning.com/perrett/
9. http://www.assembla.com/spaces/liftweb/wiki/Resources; http://richard.dallaway.com/lift-cookbook-an-introduction
10. https://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/liftweb/View_First
11. http://www.assembla.com/spaces/liftweb/wiki/MVC_(if_you_real...
12. https://github.com/harrah/xsbt; https://github.com/Lifty/lifty
13. http://seventhings.liftweb.net/