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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?

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Comments

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

http://kzar.co.uk/blog/?p=13
October 9, 2008 at 1:08 PM
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.
October 10, 2008 at 2:24 PM
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.
October 11, 2008 at 1:33 AM
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