Drawbacks to using Lift (Scala-based framework) for webservices?

Question

I have been working on a project and as I have just started on the webservice I found Lift has been released, so I am curious if there will be much more complication by using Lift over Jax-WS using JDK6.

I am doing this with the Eclipse IDE, but I don't know if I will get much benefit from the IDE on this project.

Answer 1

Lift is written in Scala, so the simple question is do you know Scala? If you don't know Scala but you do know JAX-WS, then Lift will clearly be way more work to get to a working implementation.

Scala and Lift are cool, but unless you are already comfortable with functional programming approaches, they will make your head hurt for at least 6 months. Since they are relatively new they also suffer from a lack of tooling.

You mention that you are using JAX-WS - can you do that with Lift? If you can't do it natively with Lift, can you easily integrate the standard Java libraries for this?

Depending on whether this is a personal project or work-related, your tolerance for taking technical risk can vary widely.