Does Lift make client-side javascript libraries (like Backbone) redundant?

Question

I googled around and learned that Lift encourages view-first development, lazy loading of entities, perfectly interactive wizards and validators, built-in comet etc.

It seems to cover the territory of Backbone.js and its client-side (MVC) interactive rendering brethren (and also some interactive features of jQuery).

Does Lift make a lot of Javascript needed for (two-way) interactive web apps redundant, by being mostly self-contained? Where would I still need to apply Javascript libraries?

Answer 1

Lift uses jQuery (or YUI if you want) to do the client side interactions (Ajax, comet). But you don't see that most of the time. You can of course write JavaScript on the client side and call those functions from your server code using Lift.

If you really want to use frameworks like Backbone.js you can do that, and then use Lift as a REST backend.

But in general, if you want your application to perform some comet style updates or Ajax, Using Lift will save you a lot of time and headaches. And if you want full control over the JavaScript, you can get that too.