[abstractbill]

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.]

[Zak]

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.