Lift Version 2.0 Released

The Lift community seems to be on a roll. They announced Lift 2.0 [1] and just recently Novell announced Pulse [2] based on Lift, the Scala Web Framework. Other companies are benefiting from Lift too, Foursquare [3] and parts of Xerox have adopted Lift as their prefered develop environment for web services. Apparently people are finding that Lift apps are not only as concise as Ruby on Rails applications, but run faster and are easier to maintain too. Developers can get the same productivity as RoR, but with much better performance, maintainability, and operations characteristics.

Version 2.0 comes with a bunch of new features that make it even more attractive. It is faster, slicker, and provides well integrated support for many industry standard tools and services. The Lift community have responded well to the requests from their user base and have provided a much improved platform.

The new features are:-

• NoSQL support including built-in support for MongoDB and CouchDB
• High performance JSON support including an elegant JSON DSL and bidirectional JSON <-> Class conversion
• Powerful, concise REST support
• Support for enterprise infrastructure including JTA and LDAP
• Declarative systems for single Screen input and validation as well as multiple screen Wizards
• Radically improved development experience including much better error messages and support for dynamically changing system configuration
• Support for running Lift apps outside of a J/EE Servlet containers
• Improved Comet support including modern browser detection and better connection starvation detection
• Improved support for testing including super-concise dependency injection and run-mode detection
• Support for Simple Build Tool
• Performance improvements

And there will be more to come with the release of Scala 2.8!

Learn more at the Lift 2.0 site [1].