Lift compared with Grails

Question

Lift/Scala is getting a lot of attention lately. Having worked with Grails in the past (and finding it quite handy BTW), I\'d like to know if there\'s anyone who has tried both

Answer 1

Take as a fact that Lift is hard to start with (Docs could be better, not enough paradigms) and Scala too. Anyways it's not rails-easy but IMO it pays off long-term. I agree with dpp's answer, just wanted to add seven things

Answer 2

If you're building a CRUD app and you're comfortable with Grails, then stick with it.

If any of the following things are priorities for you, then Lift is going to be better:

• Security -- Lift is more secure than Grails
• Performance -- Lift is faster than Grails because Scala is faster than Groovy
• Ajax -- Lift's Ajax support is simpler and easier than Grails
• Comet -- If you want to build server-push apps, there's nothing better than Lift
• Choice of ORMs -- Lift is not tied to a single ORM, so use anything you want

Net-net, Lift is not another me-too MVC framework. It's something different and something better.

Answer 3

Grails is a very powerful framework with much more uptake than Lift.

I also feel that Groovy is much easier to learn than Scala.

Lift is not more secure than Grails

Lift may be faster than Grails (maybe, I haven't tested this)

You are not precluded from using Ajax, Comet or ORMs other than Hibernate with Grails

Check out the plugins available for the Grails framework for more info:

http://grails.org/plugins/

Answer 4

While this compares a different basket of fruit, I think you may enjoy David Pollak's ("Lift creator") response: Why would I use Scala/Lift over Java/Spring?

One thing to remember about Lift is that it is a continuation-based framework.