

Continuations-Based Web Applications in Common Lisp With Weblocks - mcxx
http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/continuations-web.html

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pchristensen
I've taken a good look at Weblocks and I think I like what I see. Has anyone
(besides CoffeMug) worked with or have any other feedback?

Also, how mature/complete is Weblocks? I know it's new but that doesn't mean
it's not ready for use. I'm shopping for a web framework now and I'd like to
know if I should consider it. Most of the brains of my startup is data
mining/composition, but I need a front-end to display those data.

~~~
coffeemug
|Also, how mature/complete is Weblocks?

Now that control flow is in, I have to implement two more things to consider
Weblocks "ready" - more flexible UI presentation, and a default data store.

The first issue is that current default UI generation is somewhat limited in
terms of how much you can customize it in declarative manner, so people have
to resort to writing custom presentation more often than necessary.

Currently you'd have to hook weblocks to a data store on your own (some people
have done that). I plan to make a pluggable system with a default store
(probably CLSQL). Beyond that, people can contribute their own drivers to
whatever store they wish.

At this point weblocks will be very usable. There will be many little things.
Some that come to mind: automatically bundling css and js into one big file
instead of many small ones for performance, more declarative validators,
specialized presentation for more commonly used data types, "persistant"
actions (so that you can send a URL of a grid sorted in a certain way to your
friend), etc. However, each of these can be implemented in a couple of days or
less, so I don't consider these issues essential.

After implementing the two major features described above, I'll move on to
using Weblocks to write a commercial product. I'll deal with little issues as
they come along.

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pchristensen
Sounds good. Do you have a timeframe for adding those pieces? It'll probably
be early next year when I'll be ready for the front end of my app, and
everything I've read about Weblocks makes me think it'd be a good match.

I'd be interested in hearing about your commercial project as well. If you're
in the mood to share any details, I'd love to hear about them here or by email
(peter at pchristensen dot com).

~~~
mcxx
You can see the progress on the weblocks trac page: <http://trac.common-
lisp.net/cl-weblocks/timeline>

