Dec 2006

Lisp and the Web


I'll be posting more about this - it's a very lisp-ed period of life. Who said you cannot develop webapps using the old-fashioned lisp? The more i look for this sort of stuff, the more I find resources. After the usual 'parenthesis fright', and installation angers you can get it going: Hunchentoot.

Hunchentoot is a web server written in Common Lisp and at the same time a toolkit for building dynamic websites. As a stand-alone web server, Hunchentoot is capable of HTTP/1.1 chunking (both directions), persistent connections (keep-alive), and SSL, but it can also sit behind the popular Apache using Marc Battyani's mod_lisp.

Hunchentoot provides facilities like automatic session handling (with and without cookies), logging (to Apache's log files or to a file in the file system), customizable error handling, and easy access to GET and POST parameters sent by the client.

Hunchentoot talks with its front-end or with the client over TCP/IP sockets and uses multiprocessing to handle several requests at the same time. Therefore, it cannot be implemented completely in portable Common Lisp. It currently works with LispWorks (which is the main development and testing platform), CMUCL (with MP support), SBCL (with Unicode and thread support), OpenMCL, and Allegro Common Lisp.

I'm struggling with the installation of the dozens other libraries needed... but it looks worth it. The screenshot below is from an art website that uses it: Heike Stephan

Picture 12.png

Cite this blog post:


Michele Pasin. Lisp and the Web. Blog post on www.michelepasin.org. Published on Dec. 6, 2006.

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2006