Lift 2.1 ships

Glad to see they are now supporting Scala 2.8 but...<p>what happened to their website? I seem to recall a vastly different appearance before. If the look of the Lift website is an indicator to first time visitors of the quality of the framework, I wonder how many visitors don't get beyond the initial landing page.<p>Here's what I noticed immediately in about a minute: -Not a lot of contrast for colors to help material stand out -Lack of contrast leads to difficult reading on tired eyes and I'm only 30 something -Page balance - Small main content area compared to long running side panel -The quote box just looks ... meh -No favicon -The icons of the groups/companies using the framekwork appear to have a lot of artifacts in them<p>I really like Scala but this site redesign is probably not helping win new users to the framework.

Is there an article about Foursquare choosing to use Lift over other alternatives? The only ones I can find on the switch, at the moment are: <a href="http://www.scala-lang.org/node/5130" rel="nofollow">http://www.scala-lang.org/node/5130</a> and <a href="http://java.dzone.com/articles/interview-lift-creator" rel="nofollow">http://java.dzone.com/articles/interview-lift-creator</a><p>Edit: Nevermind, found the answer on Quora - <a href="http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Foursquare-choose-Lift?q=foursquare+lift" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Why-did-Foursquare-choose-Lift?q=foursq...</a>

Lift has the most natural comet abstraction I've used, but using lift's 1.0 ORM felt a little raw and the API has a steep learning curve. The sheer amount imports at the top of a class can get ugly, especially when working w/ heavy javascript. While waiting for 2.0 to have some more documentation and Record to replace Mapper, I've looked at some of the Play! Framework which seems to very straightforward scala support. Abandoning HttpServlet makes me nervous and response streaming isn't supported (no real comet), but Play! is a really refreshing web framework w/ scala support. Don't expect all forms of scalate to work though despite having a module for it.<p>I don't have any issues w/ the new liftweb site look and feel. That shouldn't be a deal breaker for a quality web framework. For example, HN seems to have a large hadron collider over clojure -- anyone remember what the non-github compojure website looks like?<p>Anyone have any success w/ the tar/zip link on the liftweb download page? Broken links for me; sad panda. :(

I didn't know about <a href="http://squeryl.org/" rel="nofollow">http://squeryl.org/</a> before seeing it in the new feature list.<p>Seems like it could be valuable competition for <a href="http://scalaquery.org/" rel="nofollow">http://scalaquery.org/</a>

I've been working with Lift a bit. It is very different from any other web framework I've ever used. That said, there's some real brilliance in it, especially how Comet and Ajax work. Lately, it's gotten a lot easier to work with, as the IDE has gotten into a usable state.<p>The learning curve is pretty steep though. You have to learn Scala, The Java APIs and the non-traditional approach to web development that Lift takes. That, and it's a young ecosystem. There aren't 101 e-commerce shopping cart systems written in it yet.

Thing that bugs me about Lift (last time I looked) is that it only supports sticky sessions. If the server your session is on goes down, you lose your session.<p>Is there a way around this in Lift yet?

So, whats the easiest, tested way for a Django programmer, outsider to the Java world to write a site running on the JVM?