Skip to main content

Lisp web tutorial?

"PHP vs. Lisp: Unfortunately, it's true..." article initiated quite active discussion on reddit, one fellow asking:

Can someone post a tutorial for taking a clean install of Ubuntu (or windows or anything) to finish with serving a basic CRUD application using lisp? Maybe a TODO list with entires consisting of: incomplete/complete boolean, due date, subject, body?

actually i had an impression that there are more than enough such tutorials, but as nobody replied i've tried finding one myself, starting with Hunchentoot tutorials. surprisingly, none of them covered a short path from clean OS install to working examples. neither i've found my ABCL-web  tutorial suitable for this, so i decided to try myself. 

my idea was that Linux distros like Debian and Ubuntu contain a lot of Lisp packages, and it should be fairly easy to install them, as it automatically manages dependencies etc. i've decided to try Hunchentoot -- i'm not using it myself, but it's known to be pretty lean, unlike other bloated frameworks. indeed, installing Hunchentoot via apt-get was pretty straightforward, and it even worked quite fine out of the box! so i've posted this comment, and it seems people found it sort of useful. so was followup on Emacs/SLIME installation.

so i wonder -- is there a lack of up-to-date installing-lisp-web-server-from-scratch tutorials indeed? if so i'll consider making one.. it seems there is a widespread opinion  that Common Lisp "learning curve at the beginning is steep as hell" and "Just setting a sane development environment is a huge pita" -- and that is opinion of people who actually succeeded in using Lisp! so maybe i can prove otherwise?

Comments

Anonymous said…
I wrote one to get it working from a fresh Debian install here:

http://kzar.co.uk/blog/?p=13
killersorm said…
nice work, Dave, i guess that delivers professional-grade development/deployment environment. but i'm afraid that many commands will scare a hell out of newbies, and won't demonstrate a point that installing CL web server is almost as easy as installing PHP one :).

perhaps your instructions would be even better if you'll add more comments to each step -- i.e. say that clbuild is a great thing to manage lisp dependencies etc.
Anonymous said…
To be honest it really isn't as easy, you're right that a lot of commands might be intimidating though.

I have tested the install a few times and it seems to work pretty well, I'm not really sure how I could reduce it down further.

I think Xach was on to something when he suggested making into a Debian package, I might have a go at that some time.
Anonymous said…
This private menu saves a lot as} 15 favourite bets for every player, dashing up betting for everybody and making complicated betting simple for extra experienced players. Roulette traces its roots to the invention in England in about 1720 of the horizontal 카지노 playing wheel for a recreation called roly poly, which featured white and black slots, however no numbers. The first modern roulette wheels were in use in Paris by 1796. Deciding quantity of} chips to place the place on the roulette table is dependent upon by} what kind of bet you wish to make.

Popular posts from this blog

Lisp syntax is great!

lots of people complain about Lisp syntax -- they find it too weird and verbose, they call LISP "Lots of Irritating  Silly Parentheses"; and sometimes they even pop up with proposals to "fix Lisp" on comp.lang.lisp -- "Lisp is sort of cool, but this syntax... let me show you my great ideas." on the other hand, most lispers (and I among them) actually love s-expression syntax. who is right here? are syntax preferences a subjective thing, or one can decide which is better quite in an (more-or-less) objective way? or, perhaps, that's just a matter of taste and custom? i've got a good example today.. i'm using Parenscript -- cool Common Lisp library that automatically generates JavaScript from Lisp-like syntax -- and i've wrote a function that caches document.getElementById results (that makes sence for dumb browsers like IE):   (defun my-element-by-id (cache id) (return (or (slot-value cache id)     (setf (slot-value cache

Belief markets: short conspiracy theories using prediction market technology

Overview This article introduces a new concept called 'belief market'. The closest relatives of belief markets are prediction markets, thus I will introduce the concept by describing how prediction and belief markets differ. Prediction markets allow participants to make bets on outcomes of events. More generally, bets can be made on answers to questions which can be unambiguously answered in future. A participant can update his position until the market is closed and a question is resolved, which makes it different from other kinds of betting. Belief markets allow participants to bet on answers to questions which cannot be reliably resolved. In other words, belief markets allow participants to bet on something they believe should be true, even if an answer cannot be determined in such a way 100% of participants would agree with. Instead of that, a virtual resolution is based on a consensus among a subset of participants. To make this possible, belief markets rely on cryptocurre