I think this proves enough about the complexity (from Lift tutorial, how you create a new project): mvn archetype:generate -U \ -DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftwe

I think this proves enough about the complexity (from Lift tutorial, how you create a new project): mvn archetype:generate -U \ -DarchetypeGroupId=net.liftweb \ -DarchetypeArtifactId=lift-archetype-blank \ -DarchetypeVersion=1.0 \ -DremoteRepositories=http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases http://scala-tools.org/repo-releases \ -DgroupId=demo.helloworld \ -DartifactId=helloworld \ -Dversion=1.0-SNAPSHOT The whole Java world is full of that kind of crap that makes it impossible to do anything in a simple way from memory only. (I'm a Django person myself and also like Rails.)