I've been working with Lift a bit. It is very different from any other web framework I've ever used. That said, there's some real brilliance in it, especially how Comet and Ajax work. Lately, it's gotten a lot easier to work with, as the IDE has gotten into a usable state.
The learning curve is pretty steep though. You have to learn Scala, The Java APIs and the non-traditional approach to web development that Lift takes. That, and it's a young ecosystem. There aren't 101 e-commerce shopping cart systems written in it yet.
I use Eclipse. For a while, during the Scala 2.7 to 2.8 transition, the Scala support was so bad I actually switched back to Emacs. Now it's fairly usable, though not as full featured as the Eclipse's Java support. I would also highly recommend you setup JRebel with Lift. It makes the development cycle go much faster.
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I've been working with Lift a bit. It is very different from any other web framework I've ever used. That said, there's some real brilliance in it, especially how Comet and Ajax work. Lately, it's gotten a lot easier to work with, as the IDE has gotten into a usable state.
The learning curve is pretty steep though. You have to learn Scala, The Java APIs and the non-traditional approach to web development that Lift takes. That, and it's a young ecosystem. There aren't 101 e-commerce shopping cart systems written in it yet.
Which IDE do you use?
If you're an Emacs user, look into Ensime, it's fantastic. http://github.com/aemoncannon/ensime
I use Eclipse. For a while, during the Scala 2.7 to 2.8 transition, the Scala support was so bad I actually switched back to Emacs. Now it's fairly usable, though not as full featured as the Eclipse's Java support. I would also highly recommend you setup JRebel with Lift. It makes the development cycle go much faster.
The best overall Scala support in an IDE is currently in Intellij IDEA. The Scala plugin works in the free, community version as well.
I've enjoyed netbeans scala support.