[kpax-devel] Re: Question regarding Rebel Without A Cause.

[Sven Van Caekenberghe]

On 28 Feb 2006, at 09:09, rfilardo at bigpond.net.au wrote:

> Hi Sven,
>
> I'm a Mac programming in the process of building a web application,  
> and not
> knowing Java but having heard of Lisp, decided if I had to learn a  
> new language
> I'll choose Lisp.  This has lead me to your fine essay "Rebel  
> Without A Cause".
> (I've also read Nicky Peter's thesis "Can a 40 year old Computer  
> Programming
> Language do Web Applications?".)
>
> I have a question regarding the deployment:  what was the purpose  
> of the second
> Xserve?  From your comments in the Future section it appears that  
> neither KPAX
> or Portable AllegroServe have load balancing or failover support.
>
> I'm also interested in your comments regarding reusable components  
> for the
> presentation layer and the need for infrastructure to ease complex  
> form processing.
> At this stage I'm still in the project definition/requirements  
> gathering stage but I
> hope I can contribute to KPAX in this area as way of saying thanks!
>
> Regards,
> Raffaele Filardo

Raffaele,

Thanks for your interest in KPAX. The article 'Rebel With A Cause'  
could indeed use some updating. For over more than a year,  
development and deployment are now using LispWorks. The described  
application was also extended.

But above all, KPAX itself was rewritten from the ground up. There  
are now additions for form processing, menus, and much more, as well  
as a large list of interesting examples. Please consult the recent  
source code - documentation is still mostly lacking - http:// 
homepage.mac.com/svc/kpax

There is now a new mailing list for KPAX called KPAX-DEVEL:

	http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kpax-devel

hosted at common-lisp.net.

I intend to use this mailing list for discussions related to KPAX,  
but also to any of my other packages on which KPAX is dependent or  
related to: S-UTILS, S-SYSDEPS, S-BASE64, S-HTTP-CLIENT and S-HTTP- 
SERVER.

Regarding load balancing and failover support: KPAX was designed to  
support load balancing with session affinity (but this has not yet  
been proven), failover (which requires session sharing/ 
synchronization) was not yet implemented, but should be possible.

Apart from the application described in 'Rebel With A Cause', KPAX  
has been used successfully in two more production applications here.

Regards,

Sven