December 5, 2007
Web applications for the elite
Weblocks is a very impressive web framework for Common Lisp, and my experiences of hacking away with it a few days have produced quite encouraging results.
Imagine a world where you don’t have to keep track of or prevent the user from
- hitting reload
- opening multiple pages in his browser
- using his back and forward buttons
Sounds good? You’d like to be there? Weblocks offers all this — and more, like automatic usage of AJAX requests if supported on the client side.
The only catch:
You need a firm grip on functional programming and a basic understanding of Lisp to use it, but learning Lisp pays off in any case, and functional programming does incredibly more so.
It helps to have experimented with Hunchentoot before.
So, from LAMP to Weblocks is probably a no-go.
Today I found another framework which has not crossed my way before that looks promising: It’s called and is apparently built on Scheme, so it makes use of continuations as well.
Comments(3)
How are things going with Weblocks?
I’m trying to learn it as well. It would be great if you wrote something about it as there is a somewhat lack of documentation.
Have you had a try with Hop? It looks pretty … well, the word that came to my mind was “insane”. Very far into the future, kind of.
Hello Ivar,
Weblocks is still part of my daily work right now. Unfortunately it’s a bit hard to write about it since it’s a complex library with a lot of different applications.
But I can suggest the following:
1) Check out the examples that come with Weblocks.
2) Browse through the posts at http://groups.google.com/group/weblocks/
3) Read the articles at http://www.defmacro.org/
4) Play around with a bit with the framework
5) Post your questions to the group. The community is very helpful.
Leslie
Thanks for the tips, it’s pretty much exactly what I have done :-)
I’ll have a further go with the defview macro sooner or later I suppose. (I want to add a :scaffold-choices option to the dropdown feature, hopefully isn’t too hard.)