How to start playing with Lift framework?

Question

What I think would be useful for me (and hopefully for other SO readers and Scala fans) is:

• How to painlessly set up lift on linux (ubuntu) (apt-get install lift #does not work)
• Is there any free server where I can run lift and Scala?

I have no experience with Java or maven or Eclipse. (but have some experience with functional programming)

I couldn't find any good tutorial on the web. Do you know any?

Answer 1

Have you tried starting with lift?

Answer 2

Lift is installed through the "Maven" package manager. Install Maven first, and then just create a new Lift project, like below, and Maven will do the rest for you, downloading all dependencies (up to and including Scala itself, if necessary).

mkdir work
cd work
mvn archetype:generate -U \ 
  -DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftweb \ 
  -DarchetypeArtifactId=lift-archetype-blank \ 
  -DarchetypeVersion=1.0 \ 
  -DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases \ 
  -DgroupId=demo.helloworld \ 
  -DartifactId=helloworld \ 
  -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT

You can hide most of that inside a script, getting just groupId, artifactId and version.

Answer 3

As for your second question, I heard Scala/Lift runs on Google App Engine ;-)

Edited: Here is a link detailing how to get Lift to run on GAE: your first Lift application on GAE/J

Answer 4

I would advise looking at the lift book, you can download the full PDF from that page. It's quite readable. I would suggest that new starters avoid the PocketChange sample application because it uses some magic in the User object that is a bit confusing and distracts from the main snippets framework IMHO.

For development, the Maven set-up uses Jetty server and getting your site running from your local machine in dev mode is automatic. If you want to deploy a hobby project with zero fuss, you can get a cheap VPS (such as Slicehost, $20 a month) and use the Winstone servlet container to host the compiled WAR file.

Answer 5

Top rated answer's link no longer works. This is the correct link now.

http://liftweb.net/getting_started

(unfortunately I don't have enough reputation to add a comment yet)