Just out of curiosity can you highlight the advantages lift has over other modern frameworks such as rails or django (and maybe some of the php frameworks). Most (or all) of the 7 things ship with rails 3. Stacking them up against one another might yield a better comparison.
I think that the author is coming from the Java world, in which case the comparison he likely had in mind is not Rails or django, but the plethora of Java web frameworks.
Personally, for Java Web Frameworks there are two I like, for quite different reasons.
The first is Spring MVC. the rest of Spring can go die in a fire for all I care, but the Spring MVC part is quite nice. Used properly it allows you to very quickly write a 'low ceremony but high fidelity' server based system. If you make some simplifying assumptions you can have all the Ajax you want too.
The other is GWT. The authors continually harp on about saving us from Javascript inconsistencies and cross browser compatibility. And, to be honest, I think they have a very good point. Anyone who has done serious web work would have run into cross browser problems. There are some other benefits to GWT, such as moving client state down to the client, where it well and truly belongs. Also the ability to pass real, proper Java objects (or at least pretend that is what you're doing) means GWT would never even notice most of the 'heavy lifting' that other frameworks keep rupturing their disks over - such as parsing form parameters, or having to post forms to the server to get them validated only to have to go back to the client and recreate the failed form... (save yourself the round trip and a square headache).
Now, obviously I'm clueless, but to my untrained eye as a programmer the bits I'd need to put into a Lift app look similar in some respects to the JSP tag libraries. E.g. they are trying to get you to do the programming in the html or xml. The problem is that xml (or any of its bastard love-children) is absolutely awful for doing logic in, which makes it deeply unsuited for that task. The only JSP tag library that I remember being worth mucking around with was some sort of super-duper-table-thingy.
Oh sure, you might not need to use weird variants on tags like <h:form> or <f:u:form> or <z:button> or whatever it was, but is moving the weirdness from the tag into the style/class really that big of an improvement? It is still doing the programming in the wrong place, that is, in the html.
I don't see any programming in HTML in these examples. Via the class attribute you specify which Lift component renders that particular fragment of your site, but there's no logic such as conditionals or computations.
Naive question here (I've worked on web apps, but it was using Java technology of the circa 2000 vintage, so my knowledge is quite limited).
It seems to me that it would be really nice for a developer to be able to treat html/javascript/css similar to the way that developers today treat assembler - a very low-level way to the browser to do exactly what you want, but something that the large majority of programmers don't need to know anything about. So that instead of needing to write html/javascript/css, a developer codes to an api that operates at a higher level (in much the same way that developers of GUI applications code to an api that operates at a high level).
Are there web frameworks that insulate developers totally from html/javascript/css? Is this what frameworks like rails/lift/django give you, at least for a limited domain of applications? Is such a framework even possible? Desireable?
The problem with your logic is that HTML / CSS ... is the most powerful API ever invented for building interfaces.
It is so powerful that similar APIs are being brought to mobile phones, e.g. Silverlight / Qt Quick; but for the record, even Silverlight / Flex are a pain compared to plain HTML / CSS (try building customized components sometimes).
The only problem with HTML / CSS is the browser inconsistencies involved and I'm obviously biased here, but it's nothing compared to what I experienced while developing / testing with Java Swing or wxWidgets.
Cross-platform is a bitch, trying to solve it is nice and all that, but you're going to quickly run into the problem of "leaky abstractions". And for the record, I tried GWT and other web frameworks that tried doing this ... I completely hated every minute of it.
Yes, one of them is NOLOH (http://www.noloh.com). It's actually an acronym for "Not One Line Of HTML". You can of course use HTML/CSS/JavaScript, but you never have to, and if you do there's extensive handling to allow you to do things you wouldn't be able to normally do in straight up JavaScript, such as handling race conditions, dynamic instantiations, and related situations.
As long as there are lots of competing, frequently changing browsers, anything that treats HTML/JS/CSS as assembler is going to be a dangerously leaky abstraction.
In my very humble (and inexperienced) opinion, Play! is the closest you're going to get to the development speed of Rails or Django and their ilk while still using Java.I recently finished writing a small app in it for a school project, and it was nothing but enjoyable. Not in love with the templating, but everything else was a joy.
List the ones that Rails does and how you achieve them (briefly). I'm pretty damn good with Rails, and it doesn't do a good chunk of this stuff, much as I love it.
