CSC/ECE 517 Fall 2014/ch1a 4 wl

WEB DEVELOPMENT USING LIFT

Lift Web Framework

Components

1. LiftCore: This is the web processor of the framework which handles the following functions.
   1. Request/Response
   2. Rendering Pipeline
   3. Invoking User Functions
2. LiftRules : Lift Configuration
3. LiftSession: Inherent Session State.
4. S: stateful context for request/response lifecycle.
5. SiteMap: contains web pages for the lift application.
6. SHtml: helper functions for XHtml.
7. Views: Views as XML content. Allows composing views from not only html files but other contexts too.
8. LiftResponse: Abstraction of response sent to the client.
9. Comet: allows sending asynchronous content to browser.
10. ORM: A specialized library.
11. HTTP Auth: provides control over authentication model.
12. JS API: JavaScript abstraction layer.

Getting Started

Set Up on Eclipse :

1. Download “Scala IDE for Eclipse” : http://scala-ide.org/
2. Install plugin in Eclipse from this update site : http://download.scala-ide.org/sdk/helium/e38/scala211/stable/site
3. Once the plugin is installed restart Eclipse
4. Install sbteclipse by adding the following to projects/plugins.sbt in your Lift Project: addSbtPlugin("com.typesafe.sbteclipse" % "sbteclipse-plugin" % "2.5.0")
5. You can then create Eclipse project files (.project and .classpath) by entering the following into the SBT prompt: eclipse

Basic Web Application Structure

Step 1: Making a SiteMap entry

Every page on the site needs a SiteMap entry.

def sitemap(): SiteMap = SiteMap(

 Menu("Home") / "index",
 Menu("Second Page") / "second"

)

Step 2: Creating the view

Create an HTML file that corresponds to the sitemap entry.

<meta content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" http-equiv="content-type"> <title>Home</title> <div id="main" class="lift:surround?with=default&at=content"> <div> Hi, I'm a page that contains the time: <span class="lift:TimeNow">??? some time</span>. </div> <div> And a button: <button class="lift:ClickMe">Click Me</button>. </div> </div>

Step 3 : Creating the Snippet

A snippet can be thought of as a controller which has rules for transforming the section of your template.

package code
package snippet

import net.liftweb._
import util._
import Helpers._

object TimeNow {
  def render = "* *" #> now.toString
}