David Pollak's Blog

It's been almost three years since my Web Framework Manifesto.  In those three years, I've founded the Lift Web Framework project, we've shipped Lift 1.0, I've seen a fair number of projects built with Lift and I've had the honor to interact with a fair number of excellent engineers at the largest social networking sites.  While Lift has pushed the envelop and allowed developers to write high performance, highly interactive web sites, there's a lot more than needs to be done.  Specifically, the impedance mismatch between browser-resident data, server-resident data, and the persistance layer.  Additionally, the current crop of persisance mechanisms, relational databases, are ill-suited to tasks including social networking and interactive gaming.

No, my machine was not hacked. Yes, I do believe that DHH and the Rails community has done far more to advance web development than the Apache Software Foundation. I radically disagree with J Aaron Farr's post comparing the two.

Two years ago, today, I launched the Lift Web Framework as an open source project.  Wow... it's been a long and fun experience... and today the dozen plus Lift committers and the whole Lift community together are releasing Lift 1.0.

I recently did a pretty negative review of the IntelliJ and its Scala support.  Based on a lot of feedback and some very polite posts from Ilya, one of the Scala plugin developers, I took another look at IntelliJ.  Based on spending more than a week with IntelliJ, configuring and tuning it, I fail to understand why someone would pay a dime for IntelliJ.  I find it to be a poorly thought out product.  The Scala support has strengths and weaknesses compared to the NetBeans Scala plugin.  If you use and like IntelliJ, you will likely disagree with this review and you'll likely find the Scala plugin to be a good tool.  If you haven't used IntelliJ yet, don't waste your time.

Scala IDEs are not up to the same level of fit and polish as as Java IDEs.  This is something of a bummer.  While I'm an early adopter and I'm willing to put up with a fair amount of rough edges, I do like having good tools.  I've been using and liking NetBeans with the Scala plugin.  I've been generally happy with it, but I've heard a lot of good things about IntelliJ, so I decided to give it a try.  IntelliJ is perhaps the worst IDE I've used in the last 10 years, Scala or no.  I'm wondering if the IntelliJ folks even have a QA department.

Folks... more information on Beginning Scala, the Scala book I'm working on. It's available for pre-order from APress's web site. Additionally, draft PDFs are available via APress's Alpha program.

I am very excited to announce that I am writing Beginning Scala and it will be published by APress.

Folks,

After many months of "breaking changes", the Lift team is proud to announce
Lift 0.10.  Lift 0.10 has frozen APIs and barring any material problems, the
0.10 APIs will be the same as the upcoming 1.0 APIs.  We're planning to
release 1.0 at the end of February.

I had a rant about Ubuntu 8.10 being a buggy release. Turns out that the Canonical people knew about the defect and release Intrepid anyway. The problem impacts about 10% of modern laptops... ones with the most common Intel WiFi chipset. The defect has not been fixed. The workaround doesn't work. What are these people thinking?

I've got lots of things to be Thankful for in my business life this year.

• The Lift community hit 700 people today.  It's a strong, vibrant, growing community full of smart and caring people.
• The Lift committers are awesome to hang with... they're so smart and driven... and they do awesome care and feeding of the Lift community.
• Scala and Lift are joys to work with.  Scala is such awesome technology and I love building cool software with it.
• The first Lift Workshop was great.  The folks who came asked awesome questions helped me understand how other people use Lift.
• Working with Dan, Luke, Kaliya and Jorge is a real joy.  They're stellar and I learn so much from them.
• Jack and Alex gave me an opportunity earlier this year... it was great working with them... and it was cool to work with an excellent CEO.
• The ESME team is a wild thing to be involved with... and I've learned more about SAP than I could have imagined.
• It's cool working with John on the book... he lends a lot of balance... and Steve's a great editor, continuing in the APress tradition.

I hope you have an awesome Thanksgiving and holiday season.

Thanks!

David

I really want to be liking Ubuntu, but the 8.10 release is once again a disaster. There's a nasty freeze bug on my ThinkPads (T61p and X300) when I use WiFi. The machines just randomly lock up. It took about 3 months before 8.04 was stable. I figured it was because the Ubuntu folks pushed a lot of stuff into the Long Term Support release. In terms of the crap that is 8.10, there's just no excuse. If 9.04 is as bad as 8.04 and 8.10, I'm going to find another distribution. Gack.

Wow!

It's been two years that I've been doing Scala development and I'm still totally grooving on the power of the language and the awesomeness of the Scala community.

I am pleased to announce the Lift Workshop.  Lift Workshop is a one day Lift training seminar and community gathering.  It's a way for you to learn about the Lift web framework, build relationships with others in the Lift and Scala communities, and give feedback to the Lift team so that we can improve Lift.

Folks,

I will be doing two presentations at the Silicon Valley Code Camp tomorrow (Sunday November 9).

I will be doing a beginner presentation on Scala tips and tricks.  I'll post the presentation slides next week.

I will also be doing an intermediate presentation on Lift.  This presentation will be a live coding example where I'll build a real time chat app.

Developing the Next Generation of Web Applications on a Shoestring

The bar for web applications keeps rising with demands for increasing richness and scalability delivered on tighter time frames and budgets. Buy a Feature is a real-time, interactive, serious game that allows product managers to learn from their customers through play. Buy a Feature runs in most browsers without add-ins and was built in less than 1 man-year using the Lift web framework and Scala programming language. Buy a Feature is deployed on a standard J2EE app server and on a dual-Opteron machine supports 2,000 simultaneous players and serves 700 pages per second. Join the Buy a Feature team, Dan O'Leary and David Pollak, as they discuss the technology and agile process that made Buy a Feature a reality.

Where: Pillsbury Winthrop, 2475 Hanover Street, Palo Alto, 94304
When: Wednesday, November 12, 2008
6:30pm Registration, Pizza, networking, and small-talk
6:50pm Introduction and announcements
7:00pm - 8:30pm David Pollak, Lift, Dan O'Leary, CTO Enthiosys, Inc.