Airlift is a free LGPL Java library designed to make application development easier. It strives to enable and maximize the portability, reusability and longevity of developed application and business logic. This includes model driven architecture, persistent objects and related artifacts, coded user interaction and validation logic, business process logic, access control logic, and persistent data processing logic.

• Airlift enables and promotes separation of presentation logic from:
  • Underlying application/business logic. New presentation should be pluggable with minimal impact upon underlying application logic.
  • Underlying object persistence technologies, legacy and emerging.
• Airlift-based applications are built using a model-driven approach to development and maintenance of an application?s persistent objects and related object persistence mappings and infrastructure.
• Airlift has been developed initially by a team of three, fulfilling the team member's ideas to create a framework that would separate presentation and persistence from the application logic. Quite often, large corporate clients consider acceptance of an applications not as much by quality of the business layer, but what type of persistence and presentation it offers ("Oracle only, SQL Server only etc"). Our goal is to enable development of robust application layer, while allowing pluggability on persistence and presentation boundaries.
• Currently, there are at least 2 applications being developed using the Airlift framework.
• Airlift based application's Entity Modelling is supported using Magic Draw 9 (TM), with a generator creating Hibernate enabled persistence classes and Hibernate hbm configuration files, shielding developers from details of defining object relational mappings manually. Generating classes and configuration files for other containers and persistence layers such as EJB is planned based on client needs.
• The Application Layer architecture has always been a strong focus of Airlift.
• The currently supported Presentation Layer is Struts, Swing is currently being retrofitted from the previous version, and JSF planned.

For more architecture details, please see the latest Technology Overview (May, 2005).