Getting started with Lift

Question

I want to learn Lift. Unfortunately, all documentation which I tried either obsolete, unreadable, incorrect or combination of the above. I tried the following:

• Simlply Lift. Some things from the book I tried lead to errors.
• Exploring Lift. The structure of book is very bad. It's hard to read and try out code in the wild at the same time.
• Lift in Action. The same as the previous but you need to pay for it.

P.S. I've seen similar questions. Most of them were asked a long time ago. Did the situation improve from the time of that writings?

P.P.S. Are there any other type safe scala web frameworks (Don't offer Play 2.0. It's not typesafe. I don't see any reason to create it in Scala).

Answer 1

It is unfortunately true that the state of Lift documentation is uneven at best and there are huge gaping holes.

However, the Lift community is just full of awesomely helpful people.

My recommendation is not to play around, but rather to try and implement something. If you get stuck, ask specific, direct questions about what you're trying to do, how you're doing it and why it isn't working.

So far, though I would wish for better documentation, I've been able to get every answer that I needed either through Google or on the Lift mailing list - though I expect I might ask more questions here in the future.

Answer 2

The Lift documentation is not its strong point. The philosophy is more "try and ask if you have any problem". Here are a few tips:

Assembla

One ressource that is really useful is http://www.assembla.com/wiki/show/liftweb, there are a lots of examples so you can progressively learn how it works.

Mailing List

Otherwise you can always use the mailing list if you have specific questions even if in my opinion it is really hard to explore it fast in order to solve a problem which was already encountered. http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb

Stack Overflow

Finally, a small community is present on Stackoverflow so feel free to ask in here. This is a good way of looking for answers and creating documentation in the same time.

Source code

Don't hesitate to explore the source code and the scaladoc if you have specific questions/doubts about the behavior of a function, they are often short and even sometimes commented! http://scala-tools.org/mvnsites/liftweb-2.4-M4/#package