Chapter 8. HTTP in Lift
This chapter covers
- The request pipeline
- URL rewriting
- Dispatching and web services
Because Lift uses its view-first architecture, it’s often not clear to users who are not familiar with this setup how Lift handles requests. To that end, this chapter explains how to do everything related to request handling in Lift, such as rewriting to provide friendly URLs, dispatching to create REST web services, and understanding Lift’s HTTP pipeline.
Lift’s HTTP pipeline consists of numerous components, and it’s often difficult to visualize where the things you configure during your application boot phase actually take effect in the request cycle. This chapter starts by positioning the various pipeline components and exploring some of the configuration points available during the process. After looking at the pipeline in moderate detail, we take a deeper practical look at both URL rewriting and dispatching.