[Lispweb] Araneida

[Marco Baringer]

jeff at inf.ed.ac.uk writes:

> That some people don't mind involving Apache isn't enough to make
> Apache-based web servers a better solution either. :)
>
> I'm disappointed that so many Lisp tools seem to require
> Apache + mod_something.

which lisp tool requires apache + mod_lisp? its not tbnl, not ucw, not
kpax, nor bknr. the only one i can think of was imho (but i don't know
of anybody still using that).

> Is the reason that people think the basic HTTP and socket levels
> are uninteresting, or is there some horrible complexity there that
> they've trying to avoid having to deal with?

doing it right is longer than it looks. why should i invest time and
effort to rebuild something which already exists?

> With some of these systems, I'm left wondering what exactly they do,
> if they've turned so much over to Apache.

they leave ssl handling, gzip response compression, access control,
and caching to apache and do everything else (which is a lot).

> It's not that hard to write an HTTP server from scratch.  That's
> what I did the last time I had to make a choice of this sort, and
> and I'm not sure there's anything in more recent systems that would
> lead me to make a different decision.
>
> What I'd like to see is some Lisp-alone system that handled the
> HTTP level very well, including cases where connections were kept
> open (I didn't do all of that in my server), 

Apache already does that why should I rewrite, retest, redebug, and
maintain my own code?

>                                              and provided an easy-
> to-start-using structure on top of that.  If it came with a CLOS-
> compatible OO database, that would be ideal.
>
> The Uncommon Web structure looks like it might be good, for example,
> but I haven't examined it in detail.  Unfortunately, it seems to want
> something else to do the HTTP part.

UCW recently got its own trivial http server. Writing it was easy, but
its _slow_, probably buggy, and has 4% of the features of apache.

-- 
-Marco
Ring the bells that still can ring.
Forget the perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything.
That's how the light gets in.
	-Leonard Cohen