It was five years ago that I founded the Lift Web Framework project.
At that time, the Scala community was very small and academically focused. Lift was one of the first external libraries for Scala and Lift is now the venerable, longest-lived external library in the Scala ecosystem.
The Lift community has grown to over 3,000 people and more than 50 committers. There are multiple books on Lift and hundreds of sites built on Lift.
Lift has demonstrated the power of community and a different approach to web frameworks. Lift-powered apps scale. Lift-powered apps are secure. Lift-powered apps don’t make the news because they just work and this frees the developers to add features to the sites.
Most importantly, though, is the Lift community. It’s a community full of helpful, engaging people who help each other and help grow the quality of Lift as a whole.
Five years is an excellent milestone and it’s a great starting place for the next phase of Lift.
Some of Lift’s differences include:
Bottom line, Lift does Seven Things better than any other web framework.
It took 2 years from the time Lift was launched until we launched version 1.0 of the framework. We spent those two years exploring concepts and getting the APIs to a state where they could exist over a long term without significant breakage or deprecation.
Many apps and sites were built with Lift pre-1.0. Many developers used Lift’s master/SNAPSHOT releases and they were (and continue to be) stable enough to run real, production sites on.
When we launched Lift 1.0 on February 26th 2009, Lift was mature, stable and well-used. Lift lived up to its billing as secure, scalable, and developer friendly.
In the last few years, Lift has only gotten better.
In 2010, Lift shifted from XHTML-based to supporting Html5. Lift received a bunch of other enhancements to help it mature and grow:
The above changes are a core part of Lift, but other projects and modules built on top of Lift’s powerful core continue to distinguish Lift. For example Reactive Web is the first set of functional-reactive tools for a mainstream web framework. Lift’s abstractions also allowed a developer to make Lift usable from Netty with one day’s worth of effort.
In addition to Lift’s codebase maturing, Lift’s committer team has also matured. There are over 50 Lift committers. In 2011, David Pollak who founded Lift, stepped down as Lift’s Benevolent Dictator for Life. David continues to commit to Lift and is still the most active member of the Lift mailing list, but as the committer team has grown, it was time for David to become a person among excellent peers, rather than a dictator.
On the 5th anniversary of the Lift project comes the birth of Lift Co.
Lift Co., founded by two Lift committers, David Whittaker and Andreas Joseph Krogh, provides Lift support with response time SLA, Lift Training, and consulting. Lift Co. provides geographic diversity with folks from the United States, Europe and India on the team. Lift Co. consultants include Lift committers David Pollak and Indrajit Raychaudhuri.
David and Andreas founded Lift Co. to help grow the whole Lift ecosystem and welcome partnerships with other Lift consultancies so that large-scale Lift adopters have a range of services and service providers to choose from.
Lift has grown far beyond what David Pollak expected when he founded the project five years ago. Lift continues to grow and gets better based on the ideas, feedback, and contributions from the whole Lift community. Lift will continue to develop as the best platform to build interactive and secure web applications. Lift will get better, and perhaps slimmer, based on the evolving needs of the whole Lift community.
2018/07/21 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.3.0.
2018/01/27 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.2.0.
2017/12/16 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.2.0-RC1.
2017/11/16 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.2.0-M3.
2017/09/15 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.2.0-M2.
2017/07/23 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.2.0-M1.
2017/07/02 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.1.0 final.
2017/06/18 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.1.0-RC1.
2017/05/20 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.1.0-M3.
2017/04/13 The Lift team is proud to announce the release of Lift 3.1.0-M2.
Entwicklung von Web-Applikationen mit Lift und Scala by Thomas Fiedler and Christoph Knabe.
Simply Lift, by David Pollak is an open source book, available for free in both PDF and HTML versions at http://simply.liftweb.net/.
Exploring Lift, by Derek Chen-Becker, Tyler Weir, and Marius Danciu is an open source book, available for free in both PDF and HTML versions at http://exploring.liftweb.net/.
Lift In Action by Tim Perrett is available in print and eBook format.
Lift Cookbook A community question and answers book, free at cookbook.liftweb.net
Lift Web Applications How-to by Torsten Uhlmann is available in print and eBook format.
Lift Application Development Cookbook by Gilberto T. Garcia Jr. is available in print and eBook format.