So it turns out there is a free book on the Scala web framework written by Lift developers. It is 255 pages long in pdf so it is not a toy. The bad news is that for some reason the book is provided as a bunch of LaTeX-like files. I had to downlosd a 100MB (sic!) installer for a converter to pdf. WTF?!
[Edited on Mar 09]
[Edited on Mar 09]
I skimmed through the book on Fri. It is a really nice introduction covering all the basic things (from Maven 101 and generating an empty Lift project to O/RM and AJAX support) so I believe the Lift guys should be more vocal about it (not to mention sharing a version in some user-friendly format). It definitely answered my beginner's questions about Lift.
On the negative side, the Lift framework is work in progress and so the book marks up some chapters as "provisional/partly to be deprecated". I was particularly confused with the chapter on OR/M because they mostly cover the original approach which seems to be deprecated. By no means this is something to blame authors for and I hope they will ultimately synchronize the book with the Lift roadmap.
I am not really into UI/presentation tier so I am in no position to judge the Lift framework. For some reason I was not impressed with what I saw but do not trust me in this respect. In addition, taking into account how many XML manipulations are hidden under the hood (and Scala's ability to make XML processing look cheaper) I am worried about performance.
One area I want to research further is their approach to continuations. As I understand they rely on the container to provide basic infrastructure and so no magic should be expected from, say, Tomcat5 deployments. A related questions could be COMET support with Actors because both are quite new to me. I think those two areas could be of general interest from the usage of the Scala language perspective as well.
In conclusion, I applaud the authors for a very useful resource for people interested in Scala.
On the negative side, the Lift framework is work in progress and so the book marks up some chapters as "provisional/partly to be deprecated". I was particularly confused with the chapter on OR/M because they mostly cover the original approach which seems to be deprecated. By no means this is something to blame authors for and I hope they will ultimately synchronize the book with the Lift roadmap.
I am not really into UI/presentation tier so I am in no position to judge the Lift framework. For some reason I was not impressed with what I saw but do not trust me in this respect. In addition, taking into account how many XML manipulations are hidden under the hood (and Scala's ability to make XML processing look cheaper) I am worried about performance.
One area I want to research further is their approach to continuations. As I understand they rely on the container to provide basic infrastructure and so no magic should be expected from, say, Tomcat5 deployments. A related questions could be COMET support with Actors because both are quite new to me. I think those two areas could be of general interest from the usage of the Scala language perspective as well.
In conclusion, I applaud the authors for a very useful resource for people interested in Scala.
Posts
3 comments:
Hey,
I understand the issue with Lyx, we're working on it and should be able to announce something soon.
The latest PDF is available on github:
http://cloud.github.com/downloads/tjweir/liftbook/master-20090309.pdf
Like Tyler said, we hope to have an announcement soon.
One more note. The only thing that is marked for future deprecation is the Mapper stuff, and that's not until at least 1.1. If you wouldn't mind, we would appreciate more detailed feedback. You can post to the group with comments:
http://groups.google.com/group/the-lift-book
Derek
Post a Comment