Monday, January 9, 2012

hunchentoot kicks ass lisp rules

http://weitz.de/hunchentoot/ http://www.adampetersen.se/articles/lispweb.htm ----->Lisp for the Web by Adam Petersen, April 2008 With his essay Beating the Averages , Paul Graham told the story of how his web start-up Viaweb outperformed its competitors by using Lisp. Lisp? Did I parse that correctly? That ancient language with all those scary parentheses? Yes, indeed! And with the goal of identifying its strengths and what they can do for us, I'll put Lisp to work developing a web application. In the process we'll find out how a 50 years old language can be so well-suited for modern web development and yes, it's related to all those parentheses. What to expect Starting from scratch, we'll develop a three-tier web application. I'll show how to: utilize powerful open source libraries for expressing dynamic HTML and JavaScript in Lisp, develop a small, embedded domain specific language tailored for my application, extend the typical development cycle by modifying code in a running system and execute code during compilation, and finally migrate from data structures in memory to persistent objects using a third party database. I'll do this in a live system transparent to the users of the application. Because Lisp is so high-level, I'll be able to achieve everything in just around 70 lines of code. This article will not teach you Common Lisp (for that purpose I recommend Practical Common Lisp ). Instead, I'll give a short overview of the language and try to explain the concepts as I introduce them, just enough to follow the code. The idea is to convey a feeling of how it is to develop in Lisp rather than focusing on the details.

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