3  Snippets and SiteMap

Lift services HTTP request in three ways: generating HTML pages, low level HTTP responses (e.g., REST), and responding to Ajax/Comet requests. Lift treats each type of request differently to make the semantics for responding to each type of request most natural. Put another way, it’s different to build a complex HTML page with lots of different components than to send back some JSON data that corresponds to a database record.

In this chapter, we’re going to explore how Lift does dynamic HTML page generation based on the incoming HTTP request and URL including putting “chrome” around the HTML page (menus, etc.), placing dynamic content on each page, and site navigation including access control.

The code for this chapter can be found in the samples/snippet_and_sitemap directory of the Simply Lift distribution.