[elephant-devel] Elephant success story

[Ben]

Thanks for the thanks -- it's always nice to hear that one's work is
appreciated!

Right now the documentation is mostly in the docstrings.  I made one
pass for the 0.2 release, but it wasn't very verbose.  Hopefully in
the next majorish release they will get bigger.  (I think :recover
might be mentioned in the tutorial?)

The next release will probably not happing for a month or so at least,
as my co-coder is busy at the moment.  We hope to fix some MOP issues,
and whatever else comes up.

In other news, I'm interested in making a web framework based on
Araneida and Elephant.  It would be nice to have a Seaside-ish web
framework, though since CL doesn't have real continuations (especially
not serializable ones!) probably this would be best acheived like Wee:

http://www.ntecs.de/blog/Blog/WeeFramework.rdoc

(as opposed to a CPS transformer.)  Interested parties should contact
me, I guess.

take care, B

ps does this mean I get an A on my report card?

On Sat, 6 Nov 2004, Dan Knapp wrote:

>  I thought a little praise for this project was in order.  I'm a teacher by
> profession, and our school is doing report cards now.  And, like many
> schools, we want a system that keeps bits of text to be re-used in
> different places, as appropriate... it requires a database.
>
>  I spent about four days trying to put something together with MS
> Word's mail merge.  I got 90% of the way there, but the things I
> couldn't make work were important.   Each little thing I added
> broke something else, which then needed hours of debugging.
>
>  With the deadline bearing down, I took a chance and started again
> from scratch, using OpenMCL with Elephant, and generating TeX
> output.  It took just one night - about eight hours - to make the whole
> thing!  Then I was able to incrementally add features over the next
> couple days.
>
>  It was great being able to just treat database objects like any other
> object.  It lets you do incremental development in true Lisp style.
> Working with an SQL server allows something similar, but of course
> with Elephant one keeps all the generality of Lisp.  Elephant was also
> much easier to set up, and I can easily move the database from one
> machine to another, which turned out to be important.
>
>  I do wish the :recover option to (open-store) were documented
> somewhere - I needed it at one point, and didn't see it mentioned
> anywhere until I looked in the source.  But it worked perfectly once
> I did find it.  If you don't document your features, nobody gives you
> credit for them!
>
>  So, thanks!  Elephant was very useful, and I can think of a couple
> personal things I'm going to use it for in the near future.  Kudos.
>
> -- Dan Knapp
>
>
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