Your view is not a simple string template in Lift. In most frameworks, you handle the controller first, gather all your data and pass it to a string template.

Your view is not a simple string template in Lift. In most frameworks, you handle the controller first, gather all your data and pass it to a string template. In Lift, the View is parsed and then all (there are frequently many) of the required "controllers" are invoked to fulfill the view. This is somewhat, kind-of, almost like custom tags in JSP, but about a thousand times keener, because it is all parallelized and so forth. Because of this, Lift can do things like trivially bind html to changing Actors (in the erlang sense) so that when the Actor changes, the html changes in all the browsers that viewed it. Supporting this all is non-trivial. "Persistence" usually boils down to serialize, deserialize and transactions... which are ultimately not unique to Lift, so I don't see a huge need to focus on it.