问题:

How to make a standalone lift application? Which tools/libraries to use? How does the performance compare to using lift application as a war in some application server?

回答1:

With onejar maven plugin http://onejar-maven-plugin.googlecode.com/svn/mavensite/usage.html and maven I could package jetty and project with dependencies inside one jar.

回答2:

The part of the question on performance doesn't really fit with the rest. You are primarily asking how to package the Lift application as a single JAR/WAR. This doesn't have anything to do with the runtime.

At runtime you will still be running inside a Servlet container (could be Jetty, Tomcat or a full-blown Java EE server). How you package your application won't affect the performance.

You could take a look at Hudson (a great Continuous Integration Server) to see how they deliver as a single WAR file that contains an embedded Servlet container. You can download the WAR file and run it from the command line: java -jar hudson.war