Lift Widgets

Abstract

In this chapter, we’re going to discuss widgets in Lift. A widget is essentially a library of Scala and JavaScript code that together provide packaged XHTML fragments for display on the client browser. In other web frameworks (JavaServer Faces, Struts, etc.), these are sometimes called components. An example of a widget would be small library that automatically embeds a Calendar instance (see the “Using Calendar Widgets” section), or a helper library to sort HTML tables (see the “Using the TableSorter Widget” section). Typically, widgets embody dynamic behavior on the client side, which is what makes them so attractive; static client-side content is already dead simple to generate in Lift with snippets, so the extra sauce of JavaScript binding and AJAX callbacks really makes advanced functionality easy.