Announcing Lift 2.0

June 30th, 2010

The Lift team and the Lift community are proud to announce the availability of Lift 2.0

"Lift is the kind of web framework that enables you as a developer to concentrate on the big picture. Strong, expressive typing and higher-level features like the built-in Comet support allow you to focus on innovating instead of the plumbing. Building a rich, real-time web application like Novell Pulse requires a framework with the power of Lift under the covers."
- David LaPalomento, Developer, Novell

"Foursquare switched over to Scala & Lift last September and we've been thrilled with the results. The ease of developing complex interactive ajax web pages enabled a very rapid port from our previous platform. In addition, the support we've gotten from David Pollak and the rest of the Lift team has been invaluable. It's clear they are very committed to making sure that production Lift deployments get all the attention they need to succeed."
- @harryh, Foursquare Engineering Tech Lead

Lift is an elegant, expressive web framework that allows any size team build and maintain secure, highly interactive, scalable web applicationsquickly and efficiently.  Lift is built on the Scala and compiles to JVM byte-code.  Lift applications deploy as WAR files on popular application servers and web cotainers including Jetty, Glassfish and Tomcat.  Lift applications can be monitored and managed with the same proven infrastructure used to manage and monitor any Java web application.  Lift is open source licensed under an Apache 2.0 license.

Lift features include:

  • Community... the Lift community is 2,000 members strong, super-active and always there to help with questions
  • Best Comet (server-push) support that allows the creation of dynamic application such as Novell Pulse
  • Super simple Ajax for creating highly interactive web applications without worrying about HTTP plumbing
  • Secure by default... Lift apps are resistant to the OWASP top 10 vulnerabilitys including XSS, XSRF, and parameter tampering
  • Concise and Maintainable... Lift apps typically contain fewer lines of code than corresponding Rails apps, yet are type safe so that many errors are flagged by the compiler
  • Scalable... Lift apps scale to millions of users across many servers, yet are highly efficient for single-box implementations
  • Compatible... Lift apps can take advantage of any Java library as well as the growing collection of Scala libraries

Lift 2.0's new features include:

  • 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

Lift-powered sites include:

  • Foursquare -- the multi-million user location based service that will soon surpass 1M+ checkins a day on their Lift-powered system
  • Novell Pulse -- enterprise collaboration software platform based on Google Wave
  • Xerox/XMPie -- the leading provider of software for cross-media, variable data one-to-one marketing
  • Snapsort -- Compare and decide on cameras
  • No Fouls -- Find pickup basketball games
Please join the Lift community and help use grow Lift.  And a super-big thanks to the 30+ Lift committers who have grown the Lift community and code-base to what it is today... and what it will be in the future!