I'm overall very impressed by the community response so far to this post. My first reaction to this was, "please don't dismiss it" (like the first response seemed to).
Marius was quick to agree that the web site needs some work. I have to agree here. I am surprised by a few things: 1. So much activity, yet liftweb.net homepage is highly static. There is no mention, for example, of the 2.0-M3 release, progress, new features, etc. A newbie really needs to dig into the Google Group and source code, but the home page should be pulling you in. I have repeatedly complained that I can't seem to get aggregated scaladocs for 2.0-M3 as easy as 1.0. Why is the first impression for a newbie so stale? 2. The home page doesn't display correctly on IE. It needs to (and I'm sure this is an easy fix). It may give an impression that Lift itself is so cutting edge that you need Firefox or Chrome or something -- but that is NOT the case. IE is still (unfortunately) dominant among businesses, and still has a decent market share, so it should not be ignored. 3. There are some real live solutions using Lift (like foursquare.com), and the home page should point that out! It helps add credibility. (The Novell Pulse demo was truly inspiring.) A little while ago, someone was asking about a Lift project idea, and I had recommended a Lift based CMS. My thinking was that the lift site itself could use it. I love it when people eat their own dog food -- it helps me buy into the solution. On Mar 6, 9:02 am, jonathan mawson <umpti...@gmail.com> wrote: > - How much of the difficulty that people seem to have in using Lift is > intrinsic to the framework and how much to poor docs? What are the > ***pay-offs*** for those design decisions that have made Lift harder to use? > (Even when this simply means less Rails-like.) Communicating these would go > a long way to reducing newbie frustration. Is Lift even designed to have as > wide an appeal as RoR or Grails? If not, be frank about it and communicate > where its strengths lie. Documentation is a challenge: - Scala docs have been getting better, but overall they are still pretty sparse. I find myself requiring to read the scala code as the docs are insufficient. Certainly, this can be frustrating to a newbie (though I do agree that it helps me learn Scala and Lift better). - The Wiki could be improved, and extended. Is GitHub really the best platform? (I am a Confluence fan.) Much like how GitHub was ditched for Issue Tracking, I think some thought needs to be done about the wiki platform. - White Papers don't really exist that explain the benefits of Lift's features... Topics that security, dependency injection, optimizations, configuration management, etc. should be covered. (Wiki might be a good storage and content management platform for this information.) A comparative analysis would be great: solution in Groovy/Grails vs. Scala/Lift vs. Ruby/Rails vs. Java/GWT vs. Java/Flex vs. ColdFusion. Many struggle with choosing a web framework, and the Lift site should be explaining why they should choose Lift. - The Lift Book is already out of date, and it needs to grow. For some reason, it is sticking to 1.0 compliance, but so much has changed. This was my first serious introduction to the framework, and this needs to be maintained in line with all the cool new features that are being added. Yesterday, I decided to "upgrade" my project from 2.0-M2 to 2.0-M3 and take advantage of the new features. In the 2.0-M3 announcement, it really only had release notes -- there wasn't an explanation of how to really use these new features. Where is this information? It should be going to the Lift Book, but instead I had to triangulate the information from searching the Google Group, reviewing Source Code, and reviewing the Issue Tracker. This definitely could be easier. At the end of the day, Lift is a solid framework. The attention to stability is very impressive. The attitude and activity from the community is first rate. I still question some aspects (like View First, or when I would ever use a "view"), but I am still learning and I think that Lift is still growing. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Lift" group. To post to this group, send email to lift...@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.
