Seven Things that distinguish Lift from other web frameworks January 21, 2011

Marketing is hard.  Creating concise messages is super hard.  Having 3 seconds to explain to someone why your product is better and then losing their attention is the way things work.

I've spent a lot of time working out why Lift is better than any other web framework.  I've boiled the list down to Seven Things:

1. Lazy Loading
2. Parallel page rendering
3. Comet and Ajax
4. Wiring -- declare interdepencies between page elements
5. Designer friendly templates
6. Wizard -- multipage input screens with full back-button support
7. Security

Each of the above taken in isolation is something that Lift does that few other web frameworks do (e.g., you can use JBoss Seam instead of Lift's Wizard) and Lift does each one better than any other web framework.  But taken together, they tell a compelling story about why Lift is different.

I've put together http://seventhings.liftweb.net as a way to not only list the Seven Things, but also to give code examples.  Even if you're not a Scala coder, you will be able to see the concise, elegant way that each of the seven things is expressed in Lift.

And as Lift becomes a polyglot framework, as Lift supports JRuby and Java and other languages, there will still be Seven Things that differentiate Lift from all other web frameworks.