Sunday, October 14, 2007

Fun With Scala: Liftweb Getting Started

Job one: checking out and Eclipsify-ing lift.

The instructions at the CircleShare lift blog are still current up to a point, at least as far as the prerequisites are concerned. I'm running from trunk, so my source code checkout was a little different:
svn co http://liftweb.googlecode.com/svn/liftweb

After that, the available instructions need a little (ahem) updating.

For a quick look at the kinds of things you can do with lift, run mvn install in the liftweb (top level) directory to build everything. When that's done, cd sites/project_name, where project_name is one of example, hellolift, or skittr. From there, run mvn jetty:run to start a Jetty web server running on some port on localhost. At this writing, example and hellolift run on port 8888, while skittr runs on 8889. Don't ask me why.

You can also mvn install individual projects if you want, but I don't see any harm in building them all in one shot.

To Eclipsify, make sure you have the Scala Development Tools plugin installed, then run mvn eclipse:eclipse in the project you want to be able to work with in Eclipse. You can do this for the lift source code itself (under the liftweb/lift subdirectory), or any of the example projects (liftweb/sites/project_name where project_name is as above).

Happy Lifting!

Fun With Scala: Liftweb

In my last post, I poked some serious fun at a bunch of mainstream languages (actually, their Internet communities), but left Scala pretty much alone. I chose Ruby and Java as my main characters because those are the languages I read the most about, and whose pundits' positions I felt like I could parody most accurately.

I've been interested in Scala since I first came across it, but I haven't really had to time to do much with it. I like its functional leanings, and I am intrigued by its ability to run on the JVM and interoperate seamlessly with existing Java libraries. Although when I say "interoperate", I have to acknowledge that it's a one-way street, as far as I know. Scala code can certainly invoke methods on Java classes. I have yet to figure out how to make the reverse happen (not that I've tried very hard). If I can, I will definitely try to make use of that capability.

So I've decided to do something real with Scala, to force myself to get to know it better. I've chosen Liftweb as my target project, largely because it's there and it's the only substantive chunk of Scala code I've found. You may have read about its claims to be able to implement a full-on Twitter clone in less than 1000 lines of code, with the capability of handling one million or more users on a single commodity PC.

Attention has been paid.