Joe Lennon

Lift is a web application development framework that enables the building of web applications in the Scala programming language. Because it is powered by Scala, Lift can be deployed to any Java™ Servlet container such as Tomcat or Jetty, and can make use of both Java and Scala libraries and APIs. In June 2010, Lift 2.0 became available, and it boasts an impressive array of new features and highlights. This article describes many of these features and explains how they can benefit you in the development of your own web applications.

Lift is a free, open source web application development framework for building powerful, interactive, and dynamic applications using the Scala programming language. Scala is purely object-oriented, but, uniquely, it also has support for functional programming, giving you access to features such as anonymous functions, nested functions, curry functions, and higher-order functions. Scala runs in a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), making it compatible with Java applications and libraries. These traits mean that web applications powered by Lift can use both Scala and Java class libraries. In addition, Lift applications are packaged as Web Application Archive (WAR) files and can be deployed to any web application server that supports the Servlet 2.4 specification, including Apache Tomcat 5.5 and later.

Read the full article on IBM developerWorks at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/wa-lift20/

In this IBM developerWorks article, I investigate the Django web development framework – an excellent MVC-style framework for building dynamic web applications in Python. I look at setting up a Django development environment, discuss the key components of a Django web application and then discover how a Django web application can be deployed to a production web server. The following is the abstract from IBM developerWorks:

Django is a Python-based open source Web application framework that focuses on making the process of creating database-driven Web sites and Web applications easier. Getting started with developing Django applications is simple, as a development Web server is included with the framework. However, this server is not suitable for use in a production environment, so further steps are required to deploy your Django application to the Web. In this article, you will learn about the Django framework and how to install it on your local machine. Discover how a Django application is made and about the automatic administration interface created for your application. You will then find out how to deploy your Django application to the Web on a server running Apache and mod_python. Finally, learn how Django applications can and should be scaled as your application’s requirements grow.

Read the article at http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-django/