How to organize Scala code in Lift project?

Question

After 1.5+ years of Ruby and Rails programming, I have finally started working on one of the new projects in Scala and Lift. Basically I'm trying to write an API for accessing information from a huge database (millions of rows). Lift should help me code the frontend of this project (the API part). But now, this also involves a module that would read from a compressed ZIP XML file to initially populate the database with rows. This module would need to run once in 3 months.

Where should I place this module code? or rather, How should I organise my Lift and Scala code? Where does the background processes go? Any pointers in this regard are welcome.

Answer 1

I'm a little uncertain if this is what you're after, but I'm using SBT (http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/). It draws up a default project structure. You should especially look at sub projects (http://code.google.com/p/simple-build-tool/wiki/SubProjects).

For scheduled processes you could use an actor and the ActorPing to restart the process on regular intervals. For such long intervals as 3 months you could keep track of last invocation by touching a file and checking the date on application restart. The ActorPing need to be initiated on application startup; this can be done in the lift boot. If you need to modularise it more you could create a servlet that initiates the ActorPing on servlet init.

Answer 2

Lift follows (at least the versions I use) a standard Maven 2 structure, so there is nothing special there. Just add the code in the src folder. The packages to create will depend on your design/preferences, we can't really help you with that :)