Best web framework in Common-lisp?

Question

What is the best common-lisp web framework available?

I'm looking for something that's suitable for developing commercial web applications and capable of handling high traffic sites similar to Stack Overflow. It should also have built-in session handling and other similar features.

Answer 1

Another similar SO-thread can be found here.

AllegroServe and Hunchentoot seems to be the most used webservers. Not really frameworks, though. I've got some experience using Hunchentoot w/sbcl and my tests have "proved" it to be both fast and reliable. They've both got session handling.

The author of Hunchentoot has some views on performance as well. Most likely the webserver will not be your bottleneck. If it turns out to be then remember that Hunchentoot is open source :-)

You could also take a look at SymbolicWeb which is more of a framework, but still in its early stages. Other suggestions in the other thread.

Answer 2

It's been a while since I tried to get into CL web programming, but at the time a lot of people were very happy using KPAX.

There's also Weblocks, which builds on hunchentoot.

Answer 3

My experience:

• KPAX is unmaintained, pretty low-level and not exactly well-documented
• UCW is quite hard to get into for beginners due to complexity and missing high-level documentation.
• SymbolicWeb is dead
• Use Hunchentoot directly if your needs are basic or highly specific
• Weblocks is relatively young but already suited for professional projects while offering a basic level of user-friendliness (sparse docs but a very helpful community). It also supports several stores (e.g. CLSQL, Elephant, Prevalence).

Answer 4

There's also BKNR.

Answer 5

With most success I've used webactions

from Franz. I have had a terrible hard time with UCW, but tried to write some "tutorial" for how to use it. I can not tell if anything has improved with UCW since I wrote that tutorial

As you see they say it's outdated and that's true. Why is it outdated? Because nobody has cared to improve it or actualize it, and so my conclusion is, no-one seems to like it very mucch. But YMMV of course...