Re: [Chicken-users] A call to arms

[david krentzlin]

Hi,

i think we all agree that the thing needs to be flexible, that is
loosly coupling components that deal the with the various parts of the
application. This way we can interchange the subparts as we like, e.g.
use sxml-transforms to generate views etc.

I had a look at aleric's wings project and prototyped a
dispatch-mechanism that took some ideas of wings for destructuring the
request-arguments.

I choose to use an abstraction that schemers are familiar with.
That is procedures. I named it web-procedures and it basically provides
a macro to define such procedures. The lambdalist is a description on
how to map request-arguments to parameters.

It allows dsssl-style lambda list with small additions for coercers.
As an example you could define sth like this.

(wp:define (myapp/test param1 param2 #!optional (param3 ->number 10))
   ;;param1 is bound to the value of the first positional argument
   ;;param2 is bound to the value of second position argument
   ;;param3 is bound to the value of the third positional argument if
present or to 10 if not.
   ;;param3 is automatically converted to a fixnum
)

I don't want to present the details, but there is some more like
coercers that accumulate parameters into alists, vectors, userdefinable
coercers, pluggable dispatchers based using srfi-parameters etc.
It's far from finished. It's just my attempt to address my needs in
web-dev with scheme. The whole thing builds on top of web-unity.

Of course a full-blown web-framework needs to provide more.
IMHO it's to be the glue that allows us to combine various
eggs/components to build our applications thus being able to choose the
components we need for a specific project.

I totally agree that we should check what we allready have and see how
we can integrate the parts. 

The last i want is a framework that breaks or works against me as soon
as i need to do things the creators didn't think of.

Datastorage is a subject of debate indeed. I personally like some of
the ideas of CLSQL quite much.  And i also would like to have a
unifying interface for various backends like the dbi that is present in
allmost any language. Of course it needs to be cooler than those. :)

To make long stories short: i want a flexible, usable, practical
framework so that i can stop using ruby and rails.

 
cheers david