Web Application Frameworks in Smalltalk and Common Lisp

Benjamin Pollack benjamin.pollack at gmail.com
Sat Apr 16 18:27:54 UTC 2005


Could someone please make a recording of this? I can provide hosting space 
for it, and I'd be very interested to hear a panel discussion between Marc 
and Avi.

--Benjamin

On 4/15/05, Roel Wuyts <Roel.Wuyts at ulb.ac.be> wrote:
> 
> Web application frameworks in Smalltalk and Common Lisp
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> Monday, 25th of April 2005, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
> http://prog.vub.ac.be/events/2005/BADL/WebApplicationFrameworks.html
> 
> The VUB (Programming Technology Lab), ULB (deComp), Belgian Assocation
> for Dynamic Languages (BADL) and the Belgian Smalltalk User Group
> (BSUG) are very pleased to invite you to two presentations about web
> application frameworks based on Smalltalk and Common Lisp. The two
> presenters are the main authors of the respective frameworks and will
> show you first-hand overviews and illustrate examples from, and
> experiences with, real-world use scenarios. It will be especially
> interesting to see what advantages the use of non mainstream dynamic
> programming languages brings to the table in a domain that is
> specifically targeted by Java and .NET frameworks. We also expect a
> heated discussion about the merits of the use of continuations in
> Seaside and the lack thereof in the Fractal Framework. ;)
> 
> The schedule for this event, held on Monday 25th of April, is as
> follows:
> 
> - 15:00 - 16:00 Avi Bryant, Seaside
> - 16:00 - 17:00 Marc Battyani, Fractal Framework
> - 17:00 - 18:00 Open Podium Discussion
> 
> This event is rounded out with a little reception.
> 
> The venue for the event is the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Campus
> Etterbeek, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. For a description of
> how to get there see http://www.vub.ac.be/english/campEt.html
> 
> The exact location is still to be determined and will be announced at
> the following website:
> http://prog.vub.ac.be/events/2005/BADL/WebApplicationFrameworks.html
> 
> Please make sure to register for the event at the website, so we can
> plan ahead. The number of places will be limited according to the
> exact location of the event, and will be announced at the website.
> 
> Below are the abstracts of the presentations and the biographies of
> the speakers.
> 
> Avi Bryant, Seaside
> +++++++++++++++++++
> 
> On the web, abstraction is a dirty word. The dominant paradigms and
> philosophies of web development -- CGI, Servlets, Server Pages, REST
> -- provide only a thin wrapper around the low-level details of HTTP,
> and encourage you to use the rough stones of the transport protocol as
> the direct building blocks of your application. Web developers by and
> large reject any further abstraction in the way that assembly hackers
> once rejected structured programming: it's too inflexible, uses too
> many resources, and above all, it doesn't let you see what's *really*
> going on. As a result, web applications suffer the same problems now
> that assembly language programs did years ago; they're fragile,
> verbose, difficult to maintain and ill-suited to reuse.
> 
> That's not to say that better abstractions aren't available. The Lisp
> and Scheme communities have been working on them for years. Paul
> Graham's ViaWeb pioneered the use of closures, not query parameters,
> to capture application state in each link. Christian Quiennec showed
> how to use first class continuations to invert the flow of control of
> HTTP and put the server back in the driver's seat. Macro packages
> like htmlgen bring HTML into the language itself, opening up much more
> than a template system can provide. Meanwhile, object-oriented
> packages like WebObjects have demonstrated how to decompose the web
> page into a tree of stateful, interacting objects, allowing a finer
> granularity of development.
> 
> Seaside combines these ideas and others with the rich development
> environment of Smalltalk to provide a stable, complete, and innovative
> web application platform. This talk will introduce Seaside, and will
> focus in particular on the ways in which these abstractions can be
> leveraged to enable reuse: how to use closures, continuations, and
> intelligent HTML generation to destroy the intra- and inter-page
> coupling that is holding web development back.
> 
> Marc Battyani, Fractal Framework
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> 
> Web sites have evolved from static documents to simple applications
> (eCommerce) and now to complete applications. Today, frameworks like
> J2EE and .Net are used for writing these applications made of tens to
> hundreds of object classes. These huge frameworks suffer from the
> limitations of their programming languages. Other frameworks, based on
> continuations, are emerging but still have limitations for complex
> applications. The Framework presented here has been used in production
> since 2001 and shows how the unique qualities of Common Lisp can boost
> the productivity by more than an order of magnitude for writing web
> applications compared to J2EE/.Net. This framework automatically
> generates the presentation, modification, validation, storage and data
> integrity layers of all the object classes of an application. It
> provides session management, web controls and a unique way for
> collaborative work. Internally, it makes extensive use of the Meta
> Object Protocol, CLOS generic functions, lexical closures, and on the
> fly code generation and compilation.
> 
> The speakers
> ++++++++++++
> 
> Avi Bryant is the co-founder of Smallthought Systems Inc. Much of his
> work centers around the use of Squeak Smalltalk as a platform for
> commercial software development. As an actively contributing member of
> the Squeak community, he maintains its standard version control
> system, as well as packages for web development and relational and
> object database access. As a consultant, he has helped companies
> develop Squeak-based products for the travel, theatre, and finance
> industries, higher education, and mobile devices. Avi is based in
> Vancouver, Canada but currently residing in The Netherlands.
> 
> Marc Battyani's professional activities involve electronics design and
> writing software. He is the founder of Fractal Concept and the author
> of several open-source libraries (mod_lisp, cl-pdf, cl-typesetting).
> He works on various domains ranging from medical or industrial systems
> and applications to network infrastructure management web applications
> for banks as well as 3D software for robotized testing equipment, 6D
> real time positioning systems for the industry and the military, smart
> environmental radio sensors, etc. All the application software is
> written in Common Lisp with Fractal Concept's web application
> framework. Marc has a MSc in electronics and a MSc in computer science.
> He lives near Fontainebleau in France.
> 
> --
> Roel Wuyts
> DeComp
> roel.wuyts at ulb.ac.be Université Libre de
> Bruxelles
> http://homepages.ulb.ac.be/~rowuyts/
> Belgique
> Vice-President of the European Smalltalk Users Group: www.esug.org<http://www.esug.org>
> 
>
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