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# Introduction

Escalante is an application server for [Scala](http://scalan-lang.org),
based on the popular [JBoss Application Server 7](http://www.jboss.org/as7).

To find out how to install Escalante, or how to start it up, please check
Escalante's installtion guide. The rest of the documentation focuses on how to
take advantage of what Escalante provides for Scala application developers.

# Escalante for Lift Web Applications

In the current version, Escalante allows you to deploy
[Lift web applications](http://liftweb.net/) in a way that optimises the size
of the deployment and the memory consumption at runtime, both of which are of
paramount importance. Escalante does however still allow you to deploy
standard Lift applications. Let's look at the differences between these two
deployment modes:

## Optimising Lift applications for Escalante

Lift applications targeted for deployment in Escalante do not require any Lift
dependencies to be shipped within the application, and that includes the Scala
lang libraries too. This vastly reduces the size of your application deployment
archive.

To give you an idea, the most basic of the Lift examples, the war file for the
'Hello World' example, takes in the region of 30 MB. Without all the jar
dependencies, the war file takes a mere 8 KB.

So, the question is, how does Escalante know, at deploy time, which
dependencies your Lift application needs? Escalante figures out which
dependencies your applications needs reading a `WEB-INF/lift.xml` file within
your deployment archive. Here's an example:

    <lift-app version="2.4" scala-version="2.9.2" />