Lift (web framework)

Lift
Original author(s)	David Pollak [1]
Developer(s)	Lift Team
Initial release	2007
Stable release	3.3.0 [2] / 11 July 2018
Repository	Lift Repository
Written in	Scala
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Web framework
License	Apache License 2.0
Website	liftweb.net

Last updated October 27, 2019

Lift is a free and open-source web framework that is designed for the Scala programming language. It was originally created by David Pollak who was dissatisfied with certain aspects of the Ruby on Rails framework.^[3] Lift was launched as an open source project on 26 February 2007 under the Apache License 2.0. A commercially popular web platform often cited as being developed using Lift is Foursquare.^[4]

Free and open-source software software whose source code is available and which is permissively licensed

Free and open-source software (FOSS) is software that can be classified as both free software and open-source software. That is, anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source code is openly shared so that people are encouraged to voluntarily improve the design of the software. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the software is under restrictive copyright licensing and the source code is usually hidden from the users.

A web framework (WF) or web application framework (WAF) is a software framework that is designed to support the development of web applications including web services, web resources, and web APIs. Web frameworks provide a standard way to build and deploy web applications on the World Wide Web. Web frameworks aim to automate the overhead associated with common activities performed in web development. For example, many web frameworks provide libraries for database access, templating frameworks, and session management, and they often promote code reuse. Although they often target development of dynamic web sites, they are also applicable to static websites.

Scala is a general-purpose programming language providing support for functional programming and a strong static type system. Designed to be concise, many of Scala's design decisions aimed to address criticisms of Java.

Design goals and overview

Lift is an expressive framework for writing web applications. It draws upon concepts from peer frameworks such as Grails, Ruby on Rails, Seaside, Wicket and Django. It favors convention over configuration in the style of Ruby on Rails, although it does not prescribe the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. Rather, Lift is chiefly modeled upon the so-called "View First" (designer friendly) approach to web page development inspired by the Wicket framework. Lift is also designed to be a high-performance, scalable web framework by leveraging Scala actors to support more concurrent requests than is possible with a thread-per-request server.

Grails is an open source web application framework that uses the Apache Groovy programming language. It is intended to be a high-productivity framework by following the "coding by convention" paradigm, providing a stand-alone development environment and hiding much of the configuration detail from the developer.

Ruby on Rails, or Rails, is a server-side web application framework written in Ruby under the MIT License. Rails is a model–view–controller (MVC) framework, providing default structures for a database, a web service, and web pages. It encourages and facilitates the use of web standards such as JSON or XML for data transfer, HTML, CSS and JavaScript for user interfacing. In addition to MVC, Rails emphasizes the use of other well-known software engineering patterns and paradigms, including convention over configuration (CoC), don't repeat yourself (DRY), and the active record pattern.

Seaside (software) Smalltalk web framework

Seaside is computer software, a web framework to develop web applications in the programming language Smalltalk. It is distributed as free and open-source software under an MIT License.

As Scala program code executes within the Java virtual machine (JVM), any existing Java library and web container can be used in running Lift applications. Lift web applications are thus packaged as WAR files and deployed on any servlet 2.4 engine (for example, Tomcat 5.5.xx, Jetty 6.0, etc.). Lift programmers may use the standard Scala/Java development toolchain including IDEs such as Eclipse, NetBeans and IDEA. Dynamic web content is authored via templates using standard HTML5 or XHTML editors. Lift applications also benefit from native support for advanced web development techniques such as Comet and Ajax.

Java virtual machine runtime environment that can execute Java bytecode as a result of compiling computer programs written in the Java programming language

A Java virtual machine (JVM) is a virtual machine that enables a computer to run Java programs as well as programs written in other languages that are also compiled to Java bytecode. The JVM is detailed by a specification that formally describes what is required in a JVM implementation. Having a specification ensures interoperability of Java programs across different implementations so that program authors using the Java Development Kit (JDK) need not worry about idiosyncrasies of the underlying hardware platform.

Java is a general-purpose programming language that is class-based, object-oriented, and designed to have as few implementation dependencies as possible. It is intended to let application developers write once, run anywhere (WORA), meaning that compiled Java code can run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java applications are typically compiled to bytecode that can run on any Java virtual machine (JVM) regardless of the underlying computer architecture. The syntax of Java is similar to C and C++, but it has fewer low-level facilities than either of them. As of 2019, Java was one of the most popular programming languages in use according to GitHub, particularly for client-server web applications, with a reported 9 million developers.

A web container is the component of a web server that interacts with Java servlets. A web container is responsible for managing the lifecycle of servlets, mapping a URL to a particular servlet and ensuring that the URL requester has the correct access-rights.

The main characteristics of Lift applications are:

Resistant to common vulnerabilities including many of the OWASP.
Fast to build, concise and easy to maintain.
High performance and scale in the real world to handle big traffic levels.
Interactive like a desktop application.

The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an online community that produces freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.

History

The stable version 1.0 of Lift was released on 26 February 2009 (two years after initiation of the project).^[5] Lift 2.0 was released in June 2010.^[6] David Pollak, the original creator of Lift, discussed the release of Lift 2.0 on the popular FLOSS weekly podcast.^[7]

FLOSS Weekly is a free and open-source software (FLOSS) themed netcast from the TWiT Network. The show premiered on April 7, 2006, and features interviews with prominent guests from the free software/open source community. It was originally hosted by Leo Laporte; his cohost for the first seventeen episodes was Chris DiBona and subsequently Randal Schwartz. In May 2010, Schwartz took over from Laporte as lead host.

Lift reached five years of continuous development on 26 February 2012.^[8]

Related Research Articles

NetBeans is an integrated development environment (IDE) for Java. NetBeans allows applications to be developed from a set of modular software components called modules. NetBeans runs on Windows, macOS, Linux and Solaris. In addition to Java development, it has extensions for other languages like PHP, C, C++, HTML5, and JavaScript. Applications based on NetBeans, including the NetBeans IDE, can be extended by third party developers.

Eclipse is an integrated development environment (IDE) used in computer programming, and in 2014 was the most widely used Java IDE in one website's poll. It contains a base workspace and an extensible plug-in system for customizing the environment. Eclipse is written mostly in Java and its primary use is for developing Java applications, but it may also be used to develop applications in other programming languages via plug-ins, including Ada, ABAP, C, C++, C#, Clojure, COBOL, D, Erlang, Fortran, Groovy, Haskell, JavaScript, Julia, Lasso, Lua, NATURAL, Perl, PHP, Prolog, Python, R, Ruby, Rust, Scala, and Scheme. It can also be used to develop documents with LaTeX and packages for the software Mathematica. Development environments include the Eclipse Java development tools (JDT) for Java and Scala, Eclipse CDT for C/C++, and Eclipse PDT for PHP, among others.

Processing is an open-source graphical library and integrated development environment (IDE) built for the electronic arts, new media art, and visual design communities with the purpose of teaching non-programmers the fundamentals of computer programming in a visual context.

Apache Wicket, commonly referred to as Wicket, is a component-based web application framework for the Java programming language conceptually similar to JavaServer Faces and Tapestry. It was originally written by Jonathan Locke in April 2004. Version 1.0 was released in June 2005. It graduated into an Apache top-level project in June 2007.

JRuby is an implementation of the Ruby programming language atop the Java Virtual Machine, written largely in Java. It is free software released under a three-way EPL/GPL/LGPL license. JRuby is tightly integrated with Java to allow the embedding of the interpreter into any Java application with full two-way access between the Java and the Ruby code.

Django is a Python-based free and open-source web framework, which follows the model-template-view (MTV) architectural pattern. It is maintained by the Django Software Foundation (DSF), an independent organization established as a 501(c)(3) non-profit.

David Heinemeier Hansson is a Danish programmer and the creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web development framework and the Instiki wiki. He is also a partner at the web-based software development firm Basecamp.

RadRails is a Rapid Application Development IDE for the Ruby on Rails framework. The goal of RadRails is to provide Ruby on Rails developers with everything they need to develop, manage, test and deploy their applications. Features include source control, code assist, refactoring, debugging, WEBrick servers, generator wizards, syntax highlighting, data tools, and much more.

Solr is an open-source enterprise-search platform, written in Java, from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, real-time indexing, dynamic clustering, database integration, NoSQL features and rich document handling. Providing distributed search and index replication, Solr is designed for scalability and fault tolerance. Solr is widely used for enterprise search and analytics use cases and has an active development community and regular releases.

Apache Camel is an open source framework for message-oriented middleware with a rule-based routing and mediation engine that provides a Java object-based implementation of the Enterprise Integration Patterns using an application programming interface to configure routing and mediation rules.

Vaadin is an open-source platform for web application development. The Vaadin platform includes a set of web components, a Java web framework, and a set of tools and application starters. Its flagship product, Vaadin Platform allows the implementation of HTML5 web user interfaces using the Java Programming Language.

Titanium SDK is an open-source framework that allows the creation of native mobile apps on platforms including iOS, Android and Windows UWP from a single JavaScript codebase, developed by Appcelerator.

Play Framework is an open-source web application framework which follows the model–view–controller (MVC) architectural pattern. It is written in Scala and usable from other programming languages that are compiled to JVM Bytecode, e.g. Java. It aims to optimize developer productivity by using convention over configuration, hot code reloading and display of errors in the browser.

Yii is an open source, object-oriented, component-based MVC PHP web application framework. Yii is pronounced as "Yee" or [ji:] and in Chinese it means "simple and evolutionary" and it can be an acronym for "Yes It Is!".

Akka is a free and open-source toolkit and runtime simplifying the construction of concurrent and distributed applications on the JVM. Akka supports multiple programming models for concurrency, but it emphasizes actor-based concurrency, with inspiration drawn from Erlang.

Sails.js is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) web application framework developed atop the Node.js environment, released as free and open-source software under the MIT License. It is designed to make it easy to build custom, enterprise-grade Node.js web applications and APIs. Emulating the MVC architecture of other frameworks, like Ruby on Rails, it offers similar pattern and familiarity, reducing the cognitive burden when switching between other frameworks/languages.

References

↑ "Lift :: Team" . Retrieved 8 August 2015.
↑ https://github.com/lift/framework/releases/tag/3.3.0-release . Retrieved 1 September 2018.Missing or empty |title= (help)
↑ "David Pollak on lift and Scala". InfoQ. Retrieved 8 August 2015.
↑ "Foursquare move to Scala/Lift" . Retrieved 8 August 2015.
↑ "Home". Archived from the original on 11 December 2010. Retrieved 8 August 2015.
↑ "Lift :: 2.0 GA" . Retrieved 8 August 2015.
↑ "FLOSS Weekly 125". TWiT.tv. Retrieved 8 August 2015.
↑ "Lift :: Happy 5th Birthday" . Retrieved 8 August 2015.

External links

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] "Lift :: Team" . Retrieved 8 August 2015.

[2] ttps://github.com/lift/framework/releases/tag/3.3.0-release . Retrieved 1 September 2018.Missing or empty |title= (help)

[3] "David Pollak on lift and Scala". InfoQ. Retrieved 8 August 2015.

[4] "Foursquare move to Scala/Lift" . Retrieved 8 August 2015.

[5] "Home". Archived from the original on 11 December 2010. Retrieved 8 August 2015.

[6] "Lift :: 2.0 GA" . Retrieved 8 August 2015.

[7] "FLOSS Weekly 125". TWiT.tv. Retrieved 8 August 2015.

[8] "Lift :: Happy 5th Birthday" . Retrieved 8 August 2015.

v t e Web frameworks
Comparison
C++	CppCMS Wt
CLI	ASP.NET Core AJAX Dynamic Data MVC Razor Web Forms DNN BFC MonoRail OpenRasta Umbraco WebSharper
ColdFusion	CFWheels ColdBox Platform ColdSpring Fusebox Model-Glue
Common Lisp	Caveman2 CL-HTTP Weblocks
Haskell	Yesod Snap
Java	AppFuse Flexive Grails GWT ICEfaces ItsNat JavaServer Faces JHipster Jspx JWt OpenXava Play Remote Application Platform RIFE Seam Sling Spring Stripes Struts Tapestry Vaadin Vert.x WebWork Wicket WaveMaker ZK
JavaScript	Angular/AngularJS Backbone.js Chaplin.js Closure Dojo Toolkit Ember.js Express.js Ext JS jQuery Knockout.js Meteor MooTools Node.js OpenUI5 Prototype React Rico script.aculo.us Sencha Touch SproutCore Svelte Vue.js Wakanda
Perl	Catalyst Dancer Mason Maypole Mojolicious WebGUI
PHP	CakePHP CodeIgniter Drupal Fat-Free FuelPHP Flow Grav Gyroscope Horde Joomla Kohana Laravel Lithium Midgard MODX Nette Phalcon PHP-Fusion Pop PHP PRADO ProcessWire Qcodo Silex SilverStripe Symfony TYPO3 WordPress XOOPS Yii Zend Framework
Python	BlueBream CherryPy Django Flask Grok Nevow Pyjs Pylons Pyramid Quixote TACTIC Tornado TurboGears web2py Webware Zope 2 more ...
Ruby	Camping Merb Padrino Ruby on Rails Sinatra
Scala	Lift Play Scalatra
Smalltalk	AIDA/Web Seaside
Other languages	Vibe.d (D) Application Express (PL/SQL) Grails (Groovy) Kepler (Lua) OpenACS (Tcl) Phoenix (Elixir) SproutCore (JavaScript-Ruby) Yaws (Erlang)