We spent a fair amount of time evaluating lift, play and other frameworks recently. We ended up choosing Play for these reasons:
Developer Productivity - Having worked with a lot of the major frameworks they are all very comparable. You can say the same things about Play, GWT, you don't worry about the plumbing, setting up routes, ajax, etc. ...
Learning Curve - You really need to know Scala and functional programming to be effective with lift. Even though lift itself might be more productive, easier, etc. none of that matters if you are not experienced in Scala. And becoming truly experienced in Scala takes a fair amount of time.
Play is plain Java and so it took the developers on are team less than a day to become productive with Play, they have a great tutorial that walks through all the major parts of a Play framework.
Developer Perception: Seriously emacs? Textmate is the only way to go.
Developer Availability - Well you might be able to find Lift developers, but they come at a major premium because they know Scala. Java developers are much more common and don't have the major premium. And there are a lot more Java than Scala developers (DP charges a very healthy $250 / hour - http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-going-hourly-contracting-r... )
Templating - Yep most frameworks have them, pretty common.
Plugins - Play has those in the form of modules
In the end I would agree with Raible's findings, there is not a huge difference in frameworks.
I do find one thing curious about all of David Pollak's rants are they always reference Foursquare and Novell.
Developer Productivity - Having worked with a lot of the major frameworks they are all very comparable. You can say the same things about Play, GWT, you don't worry about the plumbing, setting up routes, ajax, etc. ...
Learning Curve - You really need to know Scala and functional programming to be effective with lift. Even though lift itself might be more productive, easier, etc. none of that matters if you are not experienced in Scala. And becoming truly experienced in Scala takes a fair amount of time.
Play is plain Java and so it took the developers on are team less than a day to become productive with Play, they have a great tutorial that walks through all the major parts of a Play framework.
Developer Perception: Seriously emacs? Textmate is the only way to go.
Developer Availability - Well you might be able to find Lift developers, but they come at a major premium because they know Scala. Java developers are much more common and don't have the major premium. And there are a lot more Java than Scala developers (DP charges a very healthy $250 / hour - http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-going-hourly-contracting-r... )
Templating - Yep most frameworks have them, pretty common.
Plugins - Play has those in the form of modules
In the end I would agree with Raible's findings, there is not a huge difference in frameworks.
I do find one thing curious about all of David Pollak's rants are they always reference Foursquare and Novell.