On May 31, 12:55 am, Sean Reque <seanre...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Concrete examples are a great teaching tool, but unless you eventually
> teach the concepts behind the examples, your students are incapable of
> applying their knowledge to do anything beyond what they can glean
> from the examples example. It's like teaching math purely through
> example with no theory: your students may be able to pass your tests,
> but they won't understand what they are doing and come next year they
> won't be able to build on what they learned.
Wholeheartedly agree with the uselessness of examples without
narrative but in the same time I honestly do not think that Lift Book
falls into that category.
>
> I'm finding the lift book sorely lacking in teaching concepts, and
> because of that I'm having an all but impossible time learning what is
> actually possible in lift.
People have their own methods of learning things. In many respects the
book is modeled based on people feedback that were starting to look at
Lift.
> I I am not the kind of programmer that
> just copies and pastes other peoples' examples. I want to understand
> my tool and use it to it's fullest potential. When the lift book
> describes how pages are rendered, as if teaching a concept, and leaves
> out essential details like what scope templates are actually searched
> in, how am I supposed to understand how Lift works without posting to
> this mailing list or reading the source code?
The LiftBook target is not for people that want to understand all the
intimate details of the framework.It is for people that wants to use
and understand Lift as a framework as a mean to build internet
applications. Honestly I'm really happy that you want to learn Lift in
a much more intimate way to explore the details of the Lift's
mechanics but for these kinds of questions you will have to:
1. Learn how to use Lift (or parts of it)
2. Dig into Lift code
3 Ask as many questions as you need on this list and Lift committers
will respond as well as members of this community and experienced
already various things.
>
> I wasted a couple of hours reducing my problem down to the simplest
> test case, and this is not the first time since learning lift where
> I've wasted so much time only to learn that either something doesn't
> work or doesn't work the way I thought. I'm pretty sure that had I
> picked rails or django for my pet project I would have been done
> already. Is it simply that Lift is too cutting edge for me?
I doubt it. I'd advice you to be skeptic end explore Lift and see if
you like it.
>Am I the
> only one wasting hours of time learning how Lift and other Java tools
> work rather than getting my app written?
Learning Lift = coding and trying things out + reading book or any
other documentation that you can find.
>
> I'm sorry if I sound frustrated. It is not just Lift I am struggling
> with. It's the whole stack I'm trying to learn!
Maybe you want to know everything too fast?
> I am just getting
> immersed into the Java world again during my spare time. JAXB
> (especially JAXB!), buildr/maven/ant, Jetty, Scala and it's Eclipse
> plugin, Lift, each one of these tools has taken up hours of my time as
> I struggle to do what I thought I could do easily by reading about the
> tool or reading the tool's documentation.
Rarely in software learning something just by reading really applies.
Lift certainly does not fall into this category.
>
> I am grateful for your response though and will take time to learn
> more about what the sitemap means in Lift.
Just ask concrete questions, provide as many details as you can about
your problem and you will get answers.
>
> - Sean Reque
>
> On May 30, 2:56 pm, "marius d." <marius.dan...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > To access a page you need to add it in the SiteMap. I assume you are a
> > bit confused about the relation between a Menu and a page. I mean
> > after all maybe for your site you don't really need a menu but in Lift
> > a Menu is much more then a visual representation of a way to navigate
> > to your pages. It specifies various things such as how to access a
> > page (constraints definition), visibility of a page in the sitemap
> > Menu etc. So in short the SiteMap + Menu + Loc describes how pages can
> > be accesses in a Lift app.
>
> > The Lift book describes that by the means of concrete examples,
> > detailed Menu & Loc descriptions etc. Maybe some things in the book
> > are not very obvious for a first read or just reading it as
> > ultimatelly learning Lift is about coding trying things. The book is
> > just a mean to an end, I would say.
>
> > Br's,
> > Marius
>
> > On May 30, 9:38 pm, Sean Reque <seanre...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > I have the pocketchange app with lift 1.0. I add a directory in webapp
> > > with an index.html file, identical to the help directory except with
> > > some changed text. I visit the URL corresponding to the directory and
> > > it doesn't show up at all, but tells me the requested resource is not
> > > found. I then add the directory index.html file to the global sitemap
> > > in Boot.scala the same as it's help counterpart, recompile and restart
> > > jetty, and suddenly, without even using or touching the sitemap, lift
> > > displays the processed template. I've read the template finding
> > > algorithm described in the exploring lift book and it makes no mention
> > > of any such requirement, and I'm pretty sure I shouldn't have to add
> > > every single template file to the global sitemap to get lift to even
> > > recognize it's existence. What important detail am I missing?
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