[Bese-devel] UCW: The Future.

[Timothy Ritchey]

First, thank you very much for taking this on Drew. We use UCW pretty  
actively at <http://paragent.com>, as well as for custom web  
applications for clients of <http://bitfauna.com>. In all cases, we  
have stuck with ucw_dev. That is what Tim Jasko started using when we  
started coding Paragent.com a couple years ago, and we have not really  
felt any incentive to make the leap for _ajax.

My only personal desire is to have a UCW that is asdf-install aware  
(or whatever the Lisp deployment system du jour happens to be - people  
seem to be talking about clbuild recently). Maybe it is just me, but  
the whole boxset, start.lisp, etc. etc. seems a little overly complex,  
not to mention the issue with deploying so many third-party libraries  
within UCW itself, and the maintenance nightmare that creates.

Just my $0.02.

Cheers,
Tim R.


On Apr 29, 2008, at 5:52 PM, Drew Crampsie wrote:

> Hello UCW users/developers,
>
> The UCW project has been without direction for quite a while now.
> We've got one of the most advanced web application development
> environments out there, but it's not used widely, unstable,
> underdocumented and a bit of a mess. In order to alleviate this
> situation, and to bring UCW into the mainstream lisp web world, I've
> volunteered to step in as maintainer/visionary.
>
> I'd like to find out who's using UCW, how they are using it, what
> versions they are using (-dev, -ajax, -something-else) and what they'd
> like to see happen to the project. I'm going to be very aggressive in
> following a few ideals/guidlines for UCW that should make it more
> widely usable.
>
> 1) No arbitrary breaking. The test suite will be run and its results
> included in every commit message. the API will not change drastically
> all the time. Libraries will not be added/removed without taking steps
> to make sure things work. A buildbot will be setup. UCW will become a
> lot more professional.
>
> 2) No reader macros, defclass*, cl-def or other 'syntax' will be used
> in the base library.
>
> 3) An effort will be made to maintain a coding style consistent with
> that of the larger lisp community, as well as internally consistent.
>
> 4) documentation will be written, and maintained. Now new features
> will be added unless documented and tested.
>
> 5) modularization will be more explicit. I added a patch a while ago
> to allow a more 'plugin' like architecture, and this will be
> exploited. component libraries, form libraries etc will not be part of
> UCW proper as there are many possible implementations. Rather, a good
> flexible modular architecture will let the user choose to mix and
> match higher level code, be it Lisp-on-Lines, ucw-ajax, or
> what-have-you.
>
> 6) Javascript will _not_be required, but will be well supported. A
> 'simple' set of ucw operators will be introduced and used for the
> examples and documentation.
>
> I have great plans for UCW over the next couple months. I'd like to
> ask everybody who reads this to chime in now and say your piece...
> lets make UCW the poster-boy for lisp web frameworks!
>
> Cheers,
>
> drewc
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