Elnode, the EmacsLisp webserver, nears release

http://nic.ferrier.me.uk/blog/2012_08/elnode-nears-1-point-0

by nic-ferrier • 14 years ago

82 30 14 years ago

nic.ferrier.me.uk

opminion2• 14 years ago

Sounds fun. The problem with elisp, though, is that it's (I am told) not a real Lisp. The info tutorial shipped with Emacs doesn't make me suspect otherwise. Perhaps a few neat elnode examples might help.

johnpmayer2• 14 years ago

Sorry, what exactly makes it "not a real lisp"? Maybe that statement is out of date, considering the addition of lexical scoping in Emacs 2.4.

Regardless, it seems like the author is able to build some real things. I know, for example, that you can run a simple file-directory server using elnode.

nic-ferrier11• 14 years ago

And, as I say, a Wiki.

nic-ferrier11• 14 years ago

There weren't enough in the article?

It is a real lisp. I think the problem you're experiencing is that EmacsLisp has a long history. So some things that have been said were said a loooong time ago and are no longer relevant.

Take a look at the other articles I have on my blog... it's clear EmacsLisp is a modern, usable, language.

opminion2• 14 years ago

First, thanks for all the effort you've put into this. Sometimes skeptical questioning comes across as negativity, I hope this wasn't the case.

A previous Elnode announcement was what made me actually want to look into Elisp more seriously, but I went straight into the Emacs Elisp manual, and found it rather low-level when it came to list construction. So I asked around:

   http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4157512

(incidentally, with "not a real lisp" I meant the admittedly narrow "isn't the same thing at all" in relation to Common Lisp or Scheme)

and gave up because I wasn't interested in Emacs-specific programs.

But I won't argue for or against that. Will give it another go starting from your site.

gstamp• 14 years ago

What is the definition of a real lisp? AFAIK lisp is just a family of computer languages. Elisp certainly isn't the most powerful or full featured but it still seems to have most of the characteristics.

derleth• 14 years ago

> What is the definition of a real lisp?

Something that makes people fight over whether Scheme is a real lisp. Something that makes people fight over whether Dylan is a real lisp.

In short, there really isn't one. Unless you say that all real lisps adhere to the Common Lisp standard, which isn't, actually, a common position to find anyone taking in real life.

gecko• 14 years ago

Rolling things up into a single response here:

    1.  Emacs Lisp is a real Lisp.  Full stop.
    2.  That said, Emacs Lisp is based on MacLisp (no
        relationship to Macintosh), which has dynamic scoping,
        not lexical scoping, and which is not a member of the
        Common Lisp family.
    3.  And *that* said, Emacs Lisp has long had a "cl" 
        package that adds many Common Lisp niceties, and, 
        since 24, has had optional lexical scoping, bringing a 
        more Common-Lisp-like experience to all aspects of
        elisp.
    4.  And all of *that* said, this particular package I 
        regard as a convenience, not a way to write a website.  
        There are many tools a devoted Emacser uses (org mode 
        and Planner mode, to name the two big ones) that want 
        to vend web pages, and this would be a great tool for 
        them, but I'd hardly recommend using elisp for a 
        "real" website.

It's completely worth learning elisp, and I think discounting this because it's "not written in a real Lisp" is bizarre, but you'd be right to look more towards Clojure or SBCL/Clozure (depending) to write a "real" Lisp website. That's just not what this is aimed at--and where it is aimed, I think it can be enormously successful.

brudgers• 14 years ago

I would say that it isn't worth letting the differences between emacs lisp and common lisp stand in the way of learning lisp (or Emacs).

johnpmayer2• 14 years ago

Just a suggestion, but I think a video tutorial demonstrating the workflow advantages would be incredible for the visibility of the project. I, for one, would like to see how you envisioned elnode as a self-contained productive development and administration environment within emacs.

edit: doh this is planned

nic-ferrier11• 14 years ago

Yes, as I said at the end, that's coming. Hopefully this week. It was important to get Elnode 0.9.9 out first.

nic-ferrier11• 14 years ago

And here is a video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TR7DPvEi7Jg&feature=youtu...

jfoutz• 14 years ago

I'm only an occasional emacs user. I've only committed a few cursor motion commands to muscle memory. I have to say, the embedded web server is a nice touch to any programming environment. far far more true in emacs itself.

Great job.

justinhj3• 14 years ago

If you build a web app in emacs you may be interested in a fully featured emacs lisp Redis client http://code.google.com/p/eredis/

nic-ferrier11• 14 years ago

wow. yeah, that could be awesome. I'd like to write an elnode adapter for that.

Is it packaged and in MELPA or Marmalade?

justinhj3• 14 years ago

No but I'd be happy to set that up

mark_l_watson• 14 years ago

Lisp hacker to Lisp hacker, that is very cool.

Really off topic but: it is great to be a programmer and write whatever we want for our side projects.

nic-ferrier11• 14 years ago

I really want to use this professionally. Lisp is so much more productive (for me at least) than other languages. I just don't want to have to use much else.

jrockway• 14 years ago

Why Emacs Lisp and not a CL? SBCL actually performs on par with more popular languages for server workloads. Emacs Lisp? Not so much.

kishi• 14 years ago

An Emacs web server existed over 10 years ago:

  http://synthcode.com/emacs/phase-0.2.1.tar.bz2

It has no doubt bit-rotted, but had some really nice features, like being able to automatically display any file as HTML with the exact same syntax highlighting that Emacs itself uses.

eschulte• 14 years ago

If it doesn't handle POST requests it doesn't count.

  (defun phase-handle-post ()
    "Phase handler for post requests"
    ;; XXXX hack, not handling multi-part form data, just treat as a GET
    ;; for now.
    (phase-handle-get) )

nic-ferrier11• 14 years ago

Emacs webservers have indeed been around for years: http://emacswiki.org/emacs/HttpServer

Most of them required other solutions for accepting the socket however and also failed to address concurrency.

Elnode, btw, does reuse Emacs' syntax highlighting code. Just try it out and see what it's like.

mhd2• 14 years ago

Given the optional lexical scoping of Emacs 24 (which elnode seems to use), I wonder what would be required to port something like this to a full-fledged CL system. Given some emulation of Emacs underpinnings, you could develop completely within Emacs and use that for smaller/local applications, but if you ever require more power, move it to e.g. SBCL and deploy...

nic-ferrier11• 14 years ago

Let's see how we get on with just emacs? Elnode can communicate (asynchronously) with lots of other Elnode nodes... the Elnode RLE module (https://github.com/nicferrier/elnode/blob/master/elnode-rle....) provides code to spin up those nodes and offload processing to them.

I think you could scale with just Emacs.

mhd2• 14 years ago

Well, I think before I'd expand to a big multi-core cluster, I'd look into my options ;)

vedang• 14 years ago

Rewriting EmacsWiki in elnode would be awesome

Elnode, the EmacsLisp webserver, nears release

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