Lift is designed to make powerful techniques easily accessible, while keeping the overall framework simple and flexible. Lift makes it fun to develop because it lets you focus on the interesting parts of coding.

For those of you have experience with other web frameworks such as Struts, Tapestry, Rails, et cetera, you must be asking yourself, "Why another framework? Does Lift really solve problems any differently or more effectively than the ones I've used before?" Based on our experience (and that of others in the growing Lift community), the answer is an emphatic, "Yes!" Lift has cherrypicked the best ideas from a number of other frameworks, while creating some novel ideas of its own. It's this combination of a solid foundation and new techniques that makes Lift so powerful.

At the same time, Lift has been able to avoid the mistakes made in the past by other frameworks. In the spirit of "convention over configuration," Lift has sensible defaults for everything while making it easy to customize precisely what you need to: no more and no less.

This open book is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-ND). You can download Exploring Lift ebook for free in PDF format (2.3 MB).