Developing Lift-based Web Applications Using Best Practices

Abstract

Nowadays, there are a large number of frameworks for developing Web applications such as Struts, JSF, Ruby on Rails and CakePHP. Each framework has its own best practices facilitating the development of web applications, and giving benefits such as saving money, improving the development effort, and reducing the development time. Lift emerges as a new Web framework which has it is own features and learns from the mistakes of other Web frameworks. Some companies such as Siemens and IBM are developing theirs applications in Scala and Lift, as well as social networks like Twitter and Foursquare. However Lift is a new Web framework and for hence it has a lack of documentation for developing Web applications through of best practices. The contribution of this paper is to obtain and discusses the best practices in order to develop Web applications with Lift avoiding common mistakes of design and implementation that other Web frameworks have. With these best practices, the developers can develop more interactive and efficient Web applications integrating features of Web 2.0 technologies with less effort as well as exploiting the framework benefits. Authors consider this work provides a guide for the Web applications development, which impacts in the software engineering community decreasing the number of errors in the implementation phase. Finally, as proof of concept we developed a set of Lift-based Web applications taking into account some best practices such as actors, Comet support, sitemap, wiring and HTML5 support.