Lift

An 8 Year Retrospective

Scala eXchange 2014 David Pollak / @dpp

Thanks to the Lift Committers: Burak Emir - Diego Medina - Peter Petersson - David Bernard - Kris Nuttycombe - Matt Farmer - Maciek Starzyk - Philipp Schmidt - David Pollak - Alex Boisvert - Debby Meredith - Stepan Koltsov - Alex Payne - Marius Danciu - Indrajit Raychaudhuri - Lee Mighdoll - Andreas Joseph Krogh - Ross Mellgren - Vassil Dichev - Antonio Salazar Cardozo - Carsten - Joe Barnes - Dave Whittaker - Ján Raška - Jonas Bonér - Eric Torreborre - Jonathan Hoffman - Julien Wetterwald - Franz Bettag - Viktor Klang - Daniel Green - Jorge Ortiz - Torsten Uhlmann - Steve Jenson - Mads Hartmann Jensen - Timothy Perrett - Francois Bertrand - Tyler Weir - Reuben Doetsch - Derek Chen-Becker - Jeppe Nejsum Madsen - Chris Wilkes - Harry Heymann - Heiko Seeberger - Al Thompson

A Word from a Lift supporter

If you want to use this stuff to make the world function better (pun intended) and do so in a great team, email: paul.dale@elemica.com

Elemica employs more Lift committers than anyone else

About @dpp

Founded Lift web framework
Wrote a bunch of commercial spreadsheets
Crazy passionate lawyer-trained tech dude

The Lift codebase is more than 8 years old
Top 3% of team size, commits, velocity, age
More than a software project: Volunteer effort

'Hello, Joe' & Rubyconf 2006

Mocking another language turned me off.

As did disdain for types and "Enterprisey" things.

Googled "Functional language, jvm"

Found Scala

Best of Ruby and Java
Java interop "Just Worked"™
Seemed like the best thing EVER!!

Scala 2.2 days

Very small community (wiki included most members)
Friendly, mostly academic
Jon Pretty: the commercial user

Me: Mostly Web Dev

Had done a couple of (proprietary) web frameworks
Spring (the hotness at the time) sucked
So, I decided to do my own web framework... for Scala

Pre-Lift: Scala with Sails

ORM and some Rails-like controller stuff... and Textile
Dec 7, 2006 - Feb 2007
Lift name from Roger Rohrbach from Gabble. Runner up: Escalate

Feeding Bears

Title going back 20+ years
John Irving: Hotel New Hampshire, etc.
Balancing community, customers, partners, etc.

Used Lift for photo-sharing dropbox thingie

Focused on REST
Some support for Actors and Comet
Tool-chain challenge

Tim O'Reilly, May 4, 2007

Not to be left out in the “doing cool things on the web”, is a fairly new framework for Scala (another highly functional language with some similar features to Erlang and Smalltalk) called lift. There’s an interesting post by the author showing a twittr clone he claims can scale to handle twittr’s traffic with only 2 machines thanks to message persistence with the Actor based model.

lift stresses security, developer productivity, ease of deployment, ease of maintainability, performance, and compatibility with existing systems.

Lift's description, today

Lift applications are: Secure Developer centric Designer friendly Scalable Modular Interactive like a desktop app

Early Stuff

Steve Jenson, Alex Boisvert, and I lived a few blocks from each other
I vowed never to do a release ... only broke vow once
David Bernard (another twin dad) set up the build process, system, and infrastructure

Innovation Games

Luke Hohmann wrote about serious games to play with business folks
Hired me to put browser-based multi-player games online
Forcing function for Lift's Comet... in IE 6

Stuff at SAP

Innovation Games played at SAP
Needed to integrate with some of SAP's systems
Tried (and failed) to excite SAP about Scala

Scala-tools.org & Scala-blogs.org

One day at SAP, IMed with David Bernard
He suggested an official Maven repo -- thus Scala-tools.org
And a shared Scala Blog: Scala-blogs.org... hosted at Blogger as an homage to @stevej

Bay FP

Was sole Scala rep at first meeting
All the functional web framework folk in one place

Ev's Thing

Ev Williams incubated Twitter and a bunch of other stuff out of a south park office
Had an idea and asked Steve Jenson to do a prototype
Steve asked me to help him do it in Lift... got to visit the Twitter offices and get to know Twitter engineers

Silicon Valley Code Camp

Presented Scala and Lift over years
Met Java Posse and Bill Venners
Eishay Smith from LinkedIn... convinced switch from Groovy to Scala

Twitter

Invited to me help out with issues
Martin and I did full frontal assault to get Twitter to adopt Scala
For a while, Lift ran the public timeline service

Scala Lift Off

First in SF 2008... tipping point for Scala @ Twitter
Held 5 events over 3 years in SF and London
Open Space conference oriented to community sharing

ESME

Behind the firewall, corporate Twitter-style communication thingie
James Governor hooked me up with Richard Hirsch, Darren Hague and others in the SAP ecosystem... and Vassil Dichev joined the merry bunch.
Demoed Lift-powered ESME to 6,000 SAP developers in Nov 2008
First Scala-based Apache project in 2009

JavaOne 2009

50% attendance drop vs. 2008
Lots of Scala and Lift presentations
Scala and Lift books (3 total) all in top 10 at bookstore sales

AMPLab Scala Preso

"We are teaching a class on highly productive parallel programming languages tu/th 2:30-4 and would love to have a talk on scala. Are you possibly interested and avaialble? More about the class can be found at http://parlang.pbwiki.com"
Spent an afternoon discussing Ruby vs. Scala and distributing JVM bytecode to a cluster
This group went on to build Spark

Lift Firsts

Maven & CI

Thanks to Chris Wilkes, Lift was the first Scala project to use Maven
Lift had its own repo... but was soon shared with the community as scala-tools.org
Thanks to Indrajit and Derek, Lift had a cross-Scala-version build system
Had the first Jenkins system and code review system in Scala-land

Git & GitHub

Lift initially hosted at Google Code
2008: got taken to lunch by the Octocats
Git changed the way the community discussed features

Code of Conduct

Informal in the beginning
Codified in 2011
Led to a really excellent community

DOM Templating

Templating via DOM re-write rather than String vomit
More secure
Liberally borrowed CSS Selector Transforms from Enlive
Heisted by certain eponymous Haskell projects
DOM writing the hotness in JS frameworks, eg ReactJS

Misc Tech Stuffs

Futures in Scala... and fast fail on collection of Futures
Parallel and lazy page render
Non-core-library Actors in Scala
Automatic Async support (including by return type)

Lift going forward

Lift 3 is alive

Breaking changes to fix cruft... much of the cruft 8 year legacy of @dpp
Streaming promises, Futures everywhere, Single Page Apps
Curated by Antonio, Matt, and Diego

Community

Continues to be strong and warm
Linear participant growth, flat question frequency
New committers (Hi Joe) continue to add new energy

A Decade of Lift?

Yes!
Will Lift have a massive growth spike? No.
Likely to be Eiffel-like...

Myths and Such

Lift's documentation is out of date and sucks

Yes! This is entirely my fault. And many Lift folks have tried to address the issue... in vain.

@dpp quit Scala and Lift

Lift grew beyond a BDFL. I recognized this and made myself intentionally a much quieter voice in the community. I still make my living doing Lift, Scala, and Clojure work.

@dpp is a nice guy

I can be

@dpp is a real bastard

I am very clear about my expectations and consequences. And I don't bluff.

Lift is stateful

Wrong. Lift has well defined and very graduated stateless to stateful rules. See above about being very clear.

Lift doesn't do Async

Beyond wrong. Lift has the best Async support of any web framework.

Lift is Servlet-only

Wrong. Marius Danciu wrote an abstraction layer for Lift requests. Jordan West and I did a Netty-Lift adapter in an afternoon and Franz Bettag has improved on it.

Lift – An 8 Year Retrospective

dpp