Re: [Chicken-users] Unfair question: best Lisp for web development?

[Graham Fawcett]

Hi Robin,

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 12:29 PM, Robin Lee Powell
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
>  I'm thinking of starting a .com; probably not an especially Web 2.0
>  sort of one, but maybe with some Ajax involved.  I seem to be more
>  comfortable with Lisps than anything else.
>
>  Are there any compelling reasons to choose a Lisp other than Chicken
>  (my current best-known) for that sort of thing?

Not that I can think of. :-)

Here's my pitch; let me find a soapbox to stand on...

<soapbox>

I've used Common Lisp to run a few small sites, but I quickly moved
over to Chicken for that sort of work. My apps run from plain-vanilla
HTML to sexy AJAX stuff, and Chicken has been a great platform for
developing across the gamut.

PLT Scheme seems to have a good community around its Web app
framework. They also have a larger community I think, and some
interesting tools. But with respect to the Web framework, I don't
think there's anything there that isn't reproducible in Chicken
(including the continuation-based logic, see the suspension egg).
Their Unicode support might be better; I don't remember.

For the Chicken Web apps I maintain, I get about 100,000 hits per day
in total, about 50MB bandwidth per day, so it's not dot-com sized; but
on the other hand, they are all running on a crappy old Linux box, and
the load-average hovers around 0.2, so I have room for growth. Overall
I'm very happy with performance.

I also appreciate that the Chicken interpreter is quite fast, so most
of my app code can stay intrepreted (it's a little easier to manage),
but I can compile the hotspots for more efficient code. Web apps don't
tend to run too hot, but it's nice to know you can squeeze out more
performance when you need it.

Chicken is a very Unix-friendly Scheme, and I find my Chicken apps are
easy to maintain from a sysadmin perspective. The few Common Lisp apps
I had (they were in SBCL, which is beautiful in its way, but weighs
800 pounds) were troublesome to manage as processes, ate huge swaths
of memory, and were not particularly efficient.

Personally, I don't use Spiffy; I wrote a custom framework instead.
But Spiffy seems to be an great tool, and many people here use it, so
you'd get good support for your efforts. I'm biased, but I think you
might enjoy the Hart HTML-generation library too.

Database-wise, we've got good library support, though each db
interface is different: there is not a common DB-API as is found in
some languages (JDBC, Python dbapi, etc.). So if you're going RDBMS,
I'd pick one database and stick with it, or help write a common dbapi
framework.

</soapbox>

Best,
Graham