Apress's firstPress series is your source for understanding cutting-edge and emerging technology. Short, highly focused, and written by experts, firstPress books save you time and effort. They contain the information you could get based on intensive research yourself or if you were to attend a conference every other week–if only you had the time. They cover the concepts and techniques that will keep you ahead of the technology curve. firstPress books are real books, in your choice of electronic or print-on-demand format, with no rough edges even when the technology itself is still rough. You can't afford to be without them!

The Definitive Guide to Lift will educate you about Lift, a great framework for building compelling web applications. 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.

By the end of this book, you'll be able to create and extend any web application you can think of.

What you'll learn

* Explore Lift, the Scala-based web framework and its fundamentals, forms, SiteMap, and more
* Walk through the PocketChange demo application
* Use the Mapper and Record Frameworks
* Use and integrate Lift with JavaScript, Ajax, and COMET
* Create Lift widgets
* Persist with Lift using JPAs (Java Persistence APIs)
* Use Lift's tagging support and web services
* Use Scala actors, third-party integrators, and more


Who is this book for?

This book is for Java web developers looking for something simpler by way of functional programming like Scala and its web framework, Lift. This book is also for Rails/Django web developers looking for something more scalable.