Scala: Lift vs. Play! For Web Development
If you're interested in doing Web development in Scala, have a look at my Stack Overflow question and even more importantly this thread that I started on the Bay Area Scala Enthusiasts mailing list.
In it, there are some choice quotes from David Pollak such as:
Anyway, my current plan of action is to learn the Play! framework and Akka. Both look very interesting and very polished. I'm hoping to find a job coding in Scala, but since I've ruled out Lift, my prospects are looking even more slim ;)
In it, there are some choice quotes from David Pollak such as:
In terms of Lift and older browsers, Lift doesn't support them (or at least it doesn't support them well.) At the end of the day, in order to use a Lift app, you need a modern browser (IE 6+, Firefox 1.5+ or WebKit-based [Chrome, Safari])...I'm feeling a little down since I was flamed pretty badly in that thread. Obviously, people in the Python world either like or at least tolerate me a lot more than people in the Scala world.
Put another way, with 99%+ of the apps people are writing in Lift, they will live in a single JVM...
[When I asked whether a user's session (such as the contents of his shopping cart) was lost when new code was deployed to the server because of the statefulness of Lift, David said] Most of the site deployments that I do in production are during well defined maintenance windows in which the entire service is shut down. I realize that there's a class of services for which that's not acceptable, but the vast majority of sites (the bottom 98% or so) are going to be cool with the maintenance window. If that's not acceptable, there will be a commercial Lift Cluster Manager...
As a practical matter, the deployment and crash scenarios that folks raise are premature optimizations because in the real world, nobody notices (or cares to complain) when Lift sessions stop and are restarted elsewhere.
Anyway, my current plan of action is to learn the Play! framework and Akka. Both look very interesting and very polished. I'm hoping to find a job coding in Scala, but since I've ruled out Lift, my prospects are looking even more slim ;)
Comments
- Tavis
I myself also want to find out more about Scala/Lift. Does that mean I need to do a poll on people's attitudes before I ask any questisions? And what if the poll says 90% religiously pompous Java/Scala pricks. Does that mean I have to kiss ass to get answers?
Very Lame!