[armedbear-devel] json-rpc?

[Alessio Stalla]

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 12:36 PM, Axel Rauschmayer <axel at rauschma.de> wrote:
> I think ABCL would make an excellent Ajax server. As such, it would
> have to support json-rpc. Any suggestions as to how to make this happen?

I think I can give you some suggestions, but keep in mind that I have
never used abcl in a web context, so other people might know better.

> The first part is obviously the server, where the two choices that I
> can see are Hunchentoot and a servlet container such as Tomcat.
> In the latter case, I would expect to use a technique like abcl-web
> (which seems a little bit complicated, but doable).

I believe Hunchentoot does not currently work on abcl, since it
depends on flexi-streams which depends on trivial-gray-streams which
iirc doesn't support abcl.
So the other option seems the most viable at the moment. Why is it
complicated? Just write a dummy servlet that dispatches every request
to a Lisp function. You can dispatch different URLs to different
functions using the servlet container (i.e. mapping the same servlet
class to different URL patterns), or if you want more flexibility do
the dispatch in Lisp, but in that case you'll need to write the
dispatch code yourself, or maybe adapt it from Hunchentoot.
You might also want to write some glue code to access the request,
response, and session objects in a more Lispy way.

> The second part is the JSON parsing. How would I do that? Via CL-JSON?
> Via Yason? Via a Java library?

I can't recommend a JSON library, but if there are mature CL
libraries, it's probably better to use one of them instead of a Java
library.

> Sorry for these newbie questions. I’m just getting started with Common
> Lisp and ABCL.

No reason to be sorry, those aren't really newbie questions, and
anyway, new users are welcome :)

hth,
Alessio Stalla