The learning curve is pretty steep though. You have to learn Scala, The Java APIs and the non-traditional approach to web development that Lift takes. That, and it's a young ecosystem. There aren't 101 e-commerce shopping cart systems written in it yet.
what happened to their website? I seem to recall a vastly different appearance before. If the look of the Lift website is an indicator to first time visitors of the quality of the framework, I wonder how many visitors don't get beyond the initial landing page.
Here's what I noticed immediately in about a minute: -Not a lot of contrast for colors to help material stand out -Lack of contrast leads to difficult reading on tired eyes and I'm only 30 something -Page balance - Small main content area compared to long running side panel -The quote box just looks ... meh -No favicon -The icons of the groups/companies using the framekwork appear to have a lot of artifacts in them
I really like Scala but this site redesign is probably not helping win new users to the framework.
Edit: Nevermind, found the answer on Quora - http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Foursquare-choose-Lift?q=foursq...
Numbers on Compete (http://siteanalytics.compete.com/foursquare.com+gowalla.com/) suggest that Foursquare is pushing quite a bit more traffic than Gowalla, at least on the web. Most reports suggest that Foursquare is also beating out Gowalla in terms of users.
(Full disclosure: I have friends at Foursquare, Gowalla, and on the Lift project. I don't really care about any one of them "winning", I just like facts.)
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/foursquare.com+gowalla.com/...
Is there a way around this in Lift yet?
"In practice, scaling a Lift site is much much easier than scaling a LAMP site. Why? Well, state exists someplace. If it exists in the JVM, you get a lot of performance benefits and stability as well as, in Lift's case, lots of security.
Contrast that with sessions in memcached. "Whoop, memcached went down, there go a pile of sessions." "Whoops, we've got a new memcached hashing algorithm, there go all the session." "Whoops, Google just crawled us creating 200,000 new sessions pushing all the but the active sessions out of cache." "Whoops, the Ruby runtime just went wild, ate all the VM on one of our boxes, memcached went down..."
So, you try storing sessions in some wacky shared version of MySQL. This solution requires tons of hardware and a team of make sure that the sharing code is correct, etc. Contrast that to using Nginx, Jetty and session affinity. It's about 4 hours of setup time and it just works. See http://blog.harryh.org/post/7550...
So, talk to a Facebook engineer about the challenges they go through to manage state between the front end, memcached, MySQL, etc. Compare that to Twitter with the famous fail whale. Compare that to Apple's store and the iTunes store which are written on WebObject (which is highly stateful.)
Lift apps running at scale typically require 7% of the front end resources of LAMP app. The Lift apps that are running at scale (Foursquare and Novell pulse are two) do not have the kind of scaling issues associated with LAMP sites that have similar traffic patterns. Scaling with Lift is neither tricky, nor risky. It's simple. It's known. It's proven. Scaling with LAMP is playing whack-a-mole with state and that only becomes a problem at scale."
See his comment under Jackson Davis's answer to this question:
http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-advantages-and-disadvantag...
(I've never use Lift or Scala.)
Sinatra would be even easier if you're doing something simple.
Edit: very curious as to the reason for downvotes on this. If you have a better answer, give it.
I don't have any issues w/ the new liftweb site look and feel. That shouldn't be a deal breaker for a quality web framework. For example, HN seems to have a large hadron collider over clojure -- anyone remember what the non-github compojure website looks like?
Anyone have any success w/ the tar/zip link on the liftweb download page? Broken links for me; sad panda. :(
It sucked ;)
However, Lift is several years older than Compojure, and is now in its second stable release, whilst Compojure has yet to reach 1.0.
Seems like it could be valuable competition for http://scalaquery.org/
