7 ms·

Ask HN: Common Lisp vs Clojure for web apps?

• tumult 17y ago
  Either will allow you to do this. I imagine the only difference (in terms of existing features for your platform) would be 'generating JavaScript.' CL has Parenscript http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/ http://common-lisp.net/project/parenscript/ which is probably more powerful than whatever JavaScript compiler/macro/generator tools you would have to hack together yourself in Clojure. As for my own personal opinion, I would choose the Lisp that has tail call optimization. If you are willing to look into a third option, I highly recommend HOP from Inria http://hop.inria.fr/ http://hop.inria.fr/ which is a Scheme web platform with a true JavaScript compiler.
  • KirinDave 17y ago
    Parenscript, a javascript generator, eh? I don't understand, why would anyone want to generate javascript from S-exprs? I understand this is fashionable in the CL world, but I've never seen any good justification for this practice outside of saying, "Now everything is in lisp." But this isn't a terribly compelling argument. Most web applications are multi-language and it doesn't seem terribly detrimental to them. Further, the state of the art in web technology moves so incredibly fast that it seems strange and almost obstructionist to insist on a secondary library that needs to be kept in synch. Finally, it tends to lead to crap designs. Anyone who does cross-browser implementations designs will tell you that simple CSS over a generic HTML framework is almost never enough. Frequently you need to introduce new enclosing scopes or add seemingly senseless markup to help make IE play nice (a torturous exercise many web designers still need to go through). So while CL has some awesome web libraries, I'd say their extensive work into making HTML+JS+CSS generation from pure lisp seems like a foundation built on sand. Sometimes I wonder if the whole exercise was just to avoid working with HTML, which many (more prejudiced) developers find distasteful to work with. I don't think Clojure is at a significant disadvantage to CL in this field. If anything, it's at an advantage in web applications, as it has access to a massive number of very good web-related and utility libraries. A paucity of modern, battle tested libraries that "work everywhere" has always been Common Lisp's achilles heel.
    • chollida1 17y ago
      Well people would do it for the same reason they use the GWT. In that case they are more familiar with Java and GWT lets them write Java and have it compiled to javascript for client side use.
    • asher 17y ago
      Good points, KD. Clearly, you've been there. Is there a good writeup somewhere of the deviations from "nice" web design that are needed?
    • hackoder 17y ago
      I (OP) agree with a lot of what you've said. I have done a lot of work in javascript, and my reason for html/js generation wasn't because I believe that everything should be lisp. I enjoy writing html, js and css from scratch. The reason I chose it as one of my criterion is because it allows you to get off the ground _fast_ if you're coding in a single language (so basically it helps with prototyping stuff). I really enjoy the html generation libraries- I can test stuff without doing a mental switch between languages, even build a half decent UI very quickly, and that is a huge advantage. My initial scripts will not need to be run in multiple browsers, they'll be simple scripts to get the app going. Since I intend to keep the scripts small and smiple, I can replace them later with javascript as the app grows.
      • KirinDave 17y ago
        Thank you for a serious response! So you view it as a net win in rapid prototyping?
    • gruseom 17y ago
      You say you "don't understand", apparently disingenuously, because you then go on to announce what the argument supposedly is, object to it, change the subject (what, exactly, does Parenscript have to do with HTML?) and end with a red herring. As someone who works in Parenscript every day and hasn't had his coffee yet, I find that irritating.
      • 17y ago
  • anonjon 17y ago
    Clojure has scriptjure: http://github.com/arohner/scriptjure http://github.com/arohner/scriptjure which compiles s-expressions to javascript.
    • tumult 17y ago
      Very cool, thanks for showing me this.
• prosa 17y ago
  On the Clojure side, definitely check out Compojure, a Sinatra-style framework. http://github.com/weavejester/compojure http://github.com/weavejester/compojure
• wglb 17y ago
  Clojure seems likely to be able to plug into whatever Java libraries you might want to use. CL (in particular, SBCL) is used to power a number of web sites and they use Lisp all the way down. One of my favorites is http://wigflip.com/ http://wigflip.com/ that has a number of fun toys. Weblocks is a good CL framework. and there is support for Posgtress (as well as mysql, etc etc) available for CL. Check those out for that side of what you can do with CL. I am less familiar with the Java world, but Clojure seems to be very capable in that area.
  • kunley 17y ago
    Last time I checked Weblocks it had an outdated documentation (as the original author left the project) and new developers were adding new super-cool stuff in such way that using it actually involved becoming a dev on the project. Few years later I experienced the same with UCW (beign another continuation-based web framework). And the same with Lisp-on-Lines (mr author, do you have something working outside of your own lisp image yet, after 5 years or so?) Then I came to conclusion that there's some reason in the CL world that many projects become write-only vacuums with NIH syndrome, and their dev communities don't care of creating a _user_ base as they favor having _dev_ base. Also the term 'change management' or 'release management' seems to be incomprehensible by CL people. That causes almost impossible to deliver a product to the customer based on such software and stay sane.
    • kunley 17y ago
      In the second sentence I meant: Few years before.
    • sedachv 17y ago
      UCW, Weblocks, and LoL were all started by people who did not understand web programming. If you're using continuations to "abstract" away browser-server interaction, you pretty much don't get web programming, period. Instead of focusing on the browser, these people want to focus on the server and pretend everything synchronously flows from there. This is a brittle and expensive (esp if you don't have first-class continuations!) illusion. That explains why the frameworks were not high-quality in the first place (note: I personally don't believe that any web framework is worth using), and more importantly why the people who started the projects left: they just don't care about web programming (or actually any programming that has to deal with asynchronous human input) and just wish it would go away. Release management is a catch-22 in the Lisp community: until people who maintain Free Software Lisp projects stop believing they don't have any users, they won't invest in it, but until they start investing in it, they'll continue to believe they have no users because people will just give up instead of complaining about it.
• smanek 17y ago
  It really depends on you (and I say this as someone who just chose to write a huge CL webapp). If you have experience with Java - I'd probably go with Clojure. If you have a lot of background with Lisp (i.e., Slime/ASDF don't scare you) I'd go with CL. If you don't know either - just pick what's more interesting to you (but be aware there's a steep learning curve either way). On the CL side of things: -You want to use Hunchentoot as your webserver -CL-SQL for persistence -CL-WHO if you want sexp => HTML, or html-template if you want pure HTML templates -Parenscript is good for Javascript since code you write in Parenscript can run on either the server or browser (it makes it really easy to Ajaxify things, for example). But, if you're doing lots of really fancy JS and you're great at the language already, I'd stick with pure Javascript. -For JSON, I personally prefer YASON to cl-json, but take your pick (they're both fine).
  • tayssir 17y ago
    I preferred Postmodern last year, for interacting with Postgresql. Around that time, I vaguely recall it was considered faster than CL-SQL as an Elephant backend; and I found it far easier to install than CL-SQL. (I recall during CL-SQL's installation, it kept signalling errors for each DB it supported which I hadn't installed. Someone at the office said I was supposed to just keep telling Slime to ignore the errors, prodding the install forward. That actually worked.) Maybe things have changed in the interim? If the OP chooses Clojure, then I'd note that the Java classpath really demands you respect its inflexibility. add-classpath is a second class citizen; I've had JDBC (the Java DB manager) swear up and down that it registered the MySQL driver I loaded via add-classpath. But come time to read from the DB, it only worked when I ensured that the MySQL driver was loaded at the beginning in the normal way. What that implies is that if I want to load a new DB driver, I'd probably have to restart the JVM. (Or do something absurdly tricky, or debug more deeply.)
    • JulianMorrison 17y ago
      I think your problem is more likely to be with class loaders than class paths. Clojure probably has to set up its own, to allow all the monkey patching it does, including dynamically setting the classpath. If JDBC was loaded already, it will be able to see Clojure objects passed as parameters, but not able to find the class by reflection on its name.
• pmjordan 17y ago
  I'm biased - I generally prefer the Clojure way of doing things to CL (data structures, unicode, portability, library compatibility) but then the last time I seriously used CL was ~2006-2007, so things may have changed since. But, to address your requirements: * JSON: clojure.contrib.json * XML: clojure.contrib.prxml I gather there are a JS generator and an SQL interfacing library in contrib as well, though I haven't used them. Worst case you can access any Java libs for those purposes. You also get to plug into any webserver that supports Java servlets, if that's an issue. The killer feature for server programming in Clojure is the STM though. It means you can multi-thread your server relatively worry-free without resorting to moving all your state out-of-process (e.g. all state lives in the DB). You still need to pay attention to synchronising I/O, but compared to manual locking of everything, STM is a piece of cake. (context on my perspective: I've delivered a Clojure-powered back-end server for a multiplayer Flash game for a customer, as well as made some minor short-lived web sites; clojure was great for all of those use cases - I'd link to them if I was allowed to put my name against them)
• francoisdevlin 17y ago
  I say Clojure, because I would be hard pressed to think of a platform better than the JVM. Garbage collection, speed, deployment are all top notch in java-land. Postgres support will probably be easier w/ Clojure, because everything is writen in terms of JDBC. Postgres is also routinely integrated w/ clojure apps. Clojure supports xml parsing out of the box, and there are json abilities in clojure-contrib.
• itistoday 17y ago
  I was in a similar situation: I love LISP and I wanted to use it for web development. I spent several days looking at Clojure and Compojure for this purpose but came to the conclusion that it was far too restrictive and cumbersome for rapid web development. Then I discovered the Dragonfly framework, a web framework for the newLISP scripting language and became its co-author. Advantages over Clojure/Compojure: - No need to switch web servers to Jetty/TomCat. (runs as cgi). - PHP-like development, no need to recompile/reload code. - Extremely dynamic and flexible routes. - Very fast and very low memory usage. - newLISP is an awesome language. http://www.rundragonfly.com/ http://www.rundragonfly.com/ http://www.newlisp.com http://www.newlisp.com Questions to the Dragonfly forum: http://www.newlispfanclub.alh.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=17 http://www.newlispfanclub.alh.net/forum/viewforum.php?f=17 It's still young and is being actively developed, but I think if you give it a look over you'll find much to love about it.
• nearestneighbor 17y ago
  Clojure is cleaner than CL, but SLIME does not appear to work as well with Clojure as it does with CL. For example, if you have a compiler error, you have to navigate to the location of the error yourself. If you have a runtime error, you get a Java backtrace, that SLIME does not help you with at all (good luck). This is something you should consider, because it will have an effect on your development speed.
• mahmud 17y ago
  Both Clojure and CL can do those basic things, now which one do you know best? This feature-based language choice is meaningless if you're not taking your own strength into consideration.
• nunb 17y ago
  > I'm building a somewhat complex web app I'm guessing that if you had a CL background the choice would be easy! The answer also depends in part on what your app structure's going to be like.. some considerations: A. Will you embed your UI logic in Lisp? B. How interactive do you want your application to be? C. How computationally intensive will it be? D. Is horizontal scalability (ala swarmiji) important? E. Will the application deal heavily with forms? F. Do you want to use SQL, or go through an ORM? Or use objects directly? (eg (mapcar #'do-foo (all 'clients))) > make it easy to deal with data in json and xml, and cl-json has been very easy to use, with trivial mapping from lisp objects to json. > allow me to generate html and javascript. We use html-template. If you're using forms you'll have to decide where you want to put your validation logic. With html-template you'll probably end up rolling your own, or do it in javascript. A big consideration may be that Clojure is much more strictly functional than CL. That may limit your coding flexibility (and be harder to adjust to if you come from an imperative-coding background). IMHO going with CL will yield greater benefit with Slime and the debugger, related to dynamically responding to requests, debugger-tested programming etc. Real-world Clojure programming seems to require a knowledge of java libraries. CL libraries have been available for everything we've wanted to do. Postmodern is probably faster, and more "native" than JDBC. If you want to put your UI complexity in Lisp (as opposed to javascript) then check out Weblocks, which has many nice features, one of which is generating validations from the data-model. If you want to write a RESTy app then plain hunchentoot should serve just as well. Have you checked out some of the Clojure/CL webcasts? They should give you a feel for the relative strengths and weaknesses of developing in both environments.