Using Jetty 7 continuations to power Lift comet support

Recently, Marius added an abstraction layer within Lift so that we could support different comet implementations over different servlet containers. Out of the box, we provide two both Jetty 6 and Jetty 7 APIs. This API is however not very well documented so I thought I would just write a short post on how to use it. In your Boot.scala file you need to put something like:

import net.liftweb.http._
import provider.servlet.containers.Jetty7AsyncProvider

class Boot {
  def boot {
    // ...other stuff here...

    LiftRules.servletAsyncProvider = (req) => 
        new Jetty7AsyncProvider(req)

  }
}

Thats pretty much all you need to do in order to swap comet implementations! If you want to use something else, like Resin etc, all you need to is write the correct provider and away you go.