CMS

[Brian Rice]

On Oct 14, 2006, at 9:25 AM, Tom Novelli wrote:
> On 10/10/06, Brian Rice <water at tunes.org> wrote:
>> Common Lisp has UCW (Uncommon Web) which is component-based and
>> therefore suitable for a CMS but it's not a CMS itself. I just had
>> some experiments done in it (hacking together a competitor for an
>> existing web-2.0 site) using the UCW-boxset tarball for ease-of-
>> installation purposes, and it's pretty good. There are also plenty of
>> free AJAX toolkits (prototype, dojo, yahoo's) that can be tied to web
>> apps with not too much effort - very few are actually strongly bound
>> to a particular server API.
>
> Thanks for the capsule reviews... it looks like we may have a winner
> here.  I've been studying up on Lisp this week, and I finally "get it"
> now that I've dealt with Forth, Python, etc. and had that talk with
> Fare.  If Lisp is so important to TUNES, we should just use it
> whenever practical, and Lisp-haters like myself will just have to come
> around eventually.  I should try to explain in writing what convinced
> me, before I forget!  Anyway, as if that's not enough, Lisp offers a
> stable language and better compilers than those other languages.  I
> presume that it'll integrate with SQL and AJAX just fine.

CLSQL: http://clsql.b9.com/ which has a SQL query lisp-language and  
nice O-R mapper, comparable with Ruby-on-Rails' ActiveRecord but more  
configurable and macro-izable... for PostGreSQL there is an  
additional utility that just takes existing tables and makes suitable  
classes for them, wrapping over foreign key relations automatically.  
I recommend only building the version of clsql that is specific to  
the database implementation you choose, as the full package goes  
through the process of trying to build bindings for every database it  
supports.

CL-AJAX: http://www.cliki.net/cl-ajax which I haven't tried but looks  
suitable.

There is also http://www.cliki.net/JavaScript which has some  
interesting links.

> I suppose we could use a few *short* PHP scripts here and there, for
> expediency's sake, at least in the beginning.  We can build the CMS
> incrementally... *anything* to make web-page editing convenient would
> be nice, at this point.

TiddlyWiki ( http://www.tiddlywiki.com/ ) was brought up at last  
night's local Lisp user group meeting and is notable that it is  
entirely done in JavaScript, and basically the server interaction is  
minimal, in terms of a basic "check this out" and "upload" API. I'm  
playing with it and am somewhat impressed so far. I don't know if  
it's even remotely useful for the kind of thing we need, but I like  
that it pushes the imagination a bit.

>> I hadn't noticed the Wikipedia deletion. That's kind of sad that
>> people still classify us only as a vapourware project when we're a
>> perfectly acceptable visionary documentation site.
>
> But first impressions are important... and our site says "We're just
> another OS project that's been dormant for 3 years".  It would be a
> huge improvement just to show that we're still alive, and to mention
> the visionary aspect right up front.  In fact, we should -- I mean,
> I'll volunteer to -- do it *this month*, as soon as I get enough input
> on the wording.

Sorry, maybe this was intended as a specific request for input on the  
wording... I suggest you just start trying to do it, and  
incrementally get feedback. The worst that happens is that the good  
PR we get for trying to do the site is tarnished just slightly by  
exposing some of our editing process.

> But anyway, it's time to put the past behind us!

Indeed.

--
-Brian
http://briantrice.com

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