ILC07 Underway

01 April 2007

The International Lisp Conference 2007 kicked off in Cambridge this morning with an excellent tutorial on Hunchentoot and Friends by Edi Weitz.

Edi was using LispWorks on Windows. He has a Starter pack which explains how to get up and running. The LispWorks folks were giving away free evaluation licenses.

Edi used Hunchentoot to develop a sample application that allowed users to enter their name and age. He then extended the application to show various features such as authentication and cl-who etc.

The Ajax demo was impressive.

In terms of production, Edi mentioned delivering to Linux with SBCL and detachtty. Also using LispWorks to produce a stand alone EXE including the web server.

Hunchentoot-test is really a suite of demos.

Performance looks to be good – there may be some performance issues because of flexi-streams. I’m a bit concerned about what would happen if a hunchentoot server experienced the slashdot effect – would it just keep spawining worker threads? Good to hear that Edi has already used Hunchentoot to deliver a number of serious commerical sites.

One of the big attractions for me is the ability to bring up a toploop onto a running web server and start debugging and tweaking without bringing the web server down. Also, of course, the amazing productivity that CL provides!

You may also be interested in The Ilc07 Group Blog.