Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by palish 6909 days ago
You'd probably be better off using Rails or Django right now. Writing a web framework in Lisp is an order of magnitude harder than just using a battle tested one.
2 comments

FWIW, Hunchentoot has performed flawlessly for me, and it is very easy to work with. I use it for clutu ( http://clutu.com/ ) among other things.

[edit: I'm not entirely sure what people mean when they say web framework, so apologies if Hunchentoot wasn't what you meant.]

I think most people mean something more like Uncommonweb or KPAX. I built a fairly sophisticated application for a client using TBNL (now Hunchentoot), CL-WHO and CLSQL.

Building a web application doesn't require a framework; it does require a set of libraries to handle talking over http, generating HTML and often talking to a database. Since most frameworks include these, some people may confuse the two. A framework is really just a half-done bottom-up application, which is pretty useful when it matches the kind of application you're building and pretty useless otherwise.

Here's a lisp web framework: http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/weblocks-demo.html

But the idea is that what you get out of lisp is an order of magnitude more power than other battle-tested ones, right? I ask this in seriousness, not to provoke a flame war.