After version 2.2 of the Lift framework was announced, JAXenter caught up with framework founder David Pollak, to find out what’s new in this release….

JAXenter: In the ‘MVC (if you really want it)’ post, the Lift team make it clear that MVC wasn’t their first choice. What finally make the team decide to include MVC support?

David Pollak: It’s always been possible to write web apps in the MVC pattern with Lift. The helper class is nothing that a skilled Lift developer couldn’t write themselves in an afternoon (it took me 45 minutes). I made the decision to include it as a demonstration of Lift’s power and flexibility. Basically, something that people get themselves worked up into a lather about can be implemented in 100 lines of code. So, for the folks that have a fetish for calling their code MVC, they can cross the “Lift doesn’t support MVC” objection off the list… not that they couldn’t have before, but now there’s a blog post about it and a class with the magic three letters so it’s official.

JAXenter: What else is new in Lift 2.2?

David Pollak: Lift 2.2 is a tremendous release:

– Wiring is a declarative mechanism for defining the formulaic relationship between HTML elements on the page. Lift will automatically update dependent elements when a predicate changes. It makes it possible to write large web pages with complex interdependencies among elements very simply. A demo can be found at http://demo.liftweb.net/invoice_wiring Just as Lift was the first web framework to have Comet support baked in and now everyone is trying to demonstrate their Comet support with simple chat demos, Wiring is the next step in web frameworks.

– Html5/Design Friendly Templates/CSS Selector transforms: it’s now much easier to work with your designers. Everyone can use the same source page and the designers don’t have to learn some templating language or anything else. The templates will all validate against Html5, yet you can add behavior to DOM elements via the class attribute (in Lift parlance, snippets). On the Lift side, it’s much easier to transform the DOM.

– Improved I18n support including I18n support for HTML as well as Strings.

– Improved support for sessionless requests

– See everything at http://liftweb.net/22_final

JAXenter: What are the next steps, for the Lift project?

David Pollak: The same as always. Lift is driven by the community… by the users that are building excellent apps using Lift. Lift features are driven by our users. A chat with @davewhat from Foursquare led to Wiring. @tackers drove a lot of the CSS Selector Transforms and sessionless requests. There are tons of other members Lift’s 2,400+ member community who have led to Lift’s continued growth and improvements.