

It's a polyglot world after all - Lift adding support for JRuby - icey
http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb/browse_thread/thread/f1638df7fbdd7b42

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barrydahlberg
_Lift is hands-down the best web framework available today..._

Can someone a little less involved please comment on the validity of this and
the claims that follow it? Is it something I should be checking out?

~~~
noelwelsh
It is pretty good. Is it the best? I couldn't say. Some misc. good points:

\- It runs on the JVM, so you get performance and libraries, but you don't
need to go through all the Java BS to get something working. (Seriously,
performance is overlooked. If performance is not an issue, why did Facebook
write HipHop?)

\- Comet support (via Actors) is great and really easy to use. Ajax as well.
Writing interactive website is very easy.

\- The "no plumbing" approach is pretty good. You don't have to setup routes
of anything (mostly). You just embed callbacks directly in the page in a lot
of cases and things just work.

\- Templates are nice.

The bad points:

\- The ORM situation isn't great.

\- The documentation is terrible (but improving).

Overall Lift is certainly worth looking at for some good ideas. Having a
concise language and simple toolkit on the JVM is great.

~~~
LiveTheDream
> If performance is not an issue, why did Facebook write HipHop?

Energy. Facebook has thousands of servers running PHP code. HipHop allows them
to have the same performance with half the servers[1]. 50% less servers at
that scale equates to non-trivial energy (and cost) savings.

[1] <http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/358>

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gregwebs
Very cool! When I first saw this I thought it was going to be about Lift
developers being able to use ruby code- there are a lot of Ruby packages out
there that they could benefit from using.

Just from looking at Scala, it seems like a superior language, and from
looking at Lift it seems like a well done web framework. However, a lot of the
benefit of Rails comes from the ecosystem where there is a plugin for your
every need. I doubt that Lift can offer enough benefits to offset that.

Maybe they can use this for their pattern matching:
<https://github.com/waves/functor>

~~~
LiveTheDream
Interesting that you say Lift developers could benefit from Ruby packages;
generally a big pro for Lift/Scala is access the the multitude of Java
packages. JRuby, Scala, Clojure and other JVM languages all benefit from that
ecosystem.

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noelwelsh
As someone who uses Lift (in addition to other frameworks) I'm a bit surprised
by this decision. Lift is at the state where it is just getting the features
and docs to be useful to a wider audience. Scala adoption is rising. It seems
David Pollak is going for the corporate market and I don't think this is the
right focus at this stage of Lift's development.

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therockhead
Is Ruby making inroads in the corporate market?

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noelwelsh
I think so. Thoughtworks, who are a straight-up corporate consultancy, have
done Ruby since 2006. Ruby is certainly further along the adoption curve than
Scala, so perhaps DPP is trying to leapfrog over the adoption of Scala by
adding JRuby support. However, IMO Scala is not what is holding Lift back --
it's lack of decent documentation. Just read the other comments on this
post...

~~~
bguthrie
I've been doing Rails work at ThoughtWorks for more than three years now.
Judging from the projects I've been on, Ruby has achieved a fair amount of
penetration with the Fortune 500 crowd. Whether that's expanding, topped off,
or contracting, I can't judge.

