On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 3:01 PM, 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. > > 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. 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? > > 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? Am I the > only one wasting hours of time learning how Lift and other Java tools > work rather than getting my app written? Simple rule... if you have a question and have spent more than 30 minutes puzzling on it, please send a message to this list. The best way for us to understand the common questions and to write documentation (books, wiki pages, etc.) is to hear questions and get a cross-section of the kinds of questions people have. As long as you are polite, you will get a polite answer. You will not get a "RTFM" answer on this list. This list is populated by the Lift committers and most of the traffic on the list is from the Lift committers... that means you've got the ears and eyes of the people who are improving Lift and the Lift documentation. In terms of being frustrated... I am deeply sorry and I understand how something different can be very frustrating. Lift is different. It's not MVC because I think MVC (at least the web version) is very limiting. SiteMap is baked in because I believe in security first. But, we are here to help and we want to help and we want to learn what works and what doesn't. Finally, please upgrade to 1.1-SNAPSHOT. A lot of the frustrations (e.g., SiteMap) that people have had with Lift are made more "developer friendly" with nicer error messages in 1.1-SNAPSHOT. This, I hope, will help guide you and other developers in the right direction. Thanks, David > > > 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! 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. > > I am grateful for your response though and will take time to learn > more about what the sitemap means in Lift. > > - 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? > > > > -- Lift, the simply functional web framework http://liftweb.net Beginning Scala http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430219890 Follow me: http://twitter.com/dpp Git some: http://github.com/dpp --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lift" group. To post to this group, send email to liftweb@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to liftweb+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/liftweb?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
