Technovangelism

At JavaOne, I attended a session given by David Pollak the creator of the Lift Web Framework. In his hour session David built, from scratch, a functional, comet-based chat application. Although short, and relatively simple, David’s talk was compelling enough for me to at least investigate Lift.

I purchased The Definitive Guide to Lift while at the conference and was able to read (note I didn’t say understand) through most of it on the plane ride home. One chapter deals specifically with adding AJAX and Comet to your application enabling push support. It covers almost everything needed to complete the Comet app but it is missing a few important lines, most notably the call to start in ClockMaster.scala.

I posted a fully working copy of the code on Github for anyone trying to use the code from the book. Hopefully it will help anyone else who got stuck in the same place I did.