Rails in Lisp

It has occurred to me that it would be interesting to produce something like [Rails][rails] in Lisp. In the interests of brevity and the general entertainment of the drunkenpacket community (all three of you), let’s give this project a pseudo-neat name: RiL.

This post is the first of several where we will discuss the possible implementation of RiL.

What is distinct about Rails:

• convention instead of configuration
• defaults work out of the box and thereby provide for rapid development
• powerful ORM mechanism
• integrated template scheme

All of these are lovely features. But to use them, we must write Ruby. Given that here at DrunkenPacket, we are afficiondoes (albeit neophyte afficionadoes) of LISP, it strikes us as eminently reasonable to investigate how we could replicate the niftyness of Rails using Lisp.

Obviously, we do not want to re-write everything in LISP. Instead, we want to imagine our Rails-in-LISP using some of the existing components that are available.

Perhaps something like HT Ajax would serve. HT Ajax is (apparently) a framework for implementing Ajax applications using the Hunchentoot web server.