BKNR Web Application Framework update
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
I have previously mentioned bknr, and some of their software projects in CL. They have a web application framework that is built on top of portable AllegroServe, a prevalence layer, an HTML template system, blog software, and a bunch of other stuff (Note: I recently commented on web servers, prevalence, and HTML template languages on my weblog). I recieved an email (reproduced with permission) from Manuel Odendahl (one of the bknr maintainers) with an update on their web application framework:
"I would like to point out the BKNR Framework (or big pile of mud, as it is sometimes called), which features a very nice XML Templater and a nice prevalence system with support for persistent CLOS objects. (a bit of self-advertising can never hurt :)Sounds interesting - I look forward to seeing the beta when it's available!
You can access the sourcecode using CVS by following the instructions at http://bknr.net/blog/bknr-devel.
BKNR is used for a few websites (most importantly eboy.com, which keeps running and running and has about 4000 visitors a day according to http://eboy.com/stats/. All pages of eboy.com are served out of XML templates.) You can also get the full sourcecode for eboy.com from the CVS. The current prevalence datastore holds a few million objects (every hit is a CLOS object).
The object system is being rewritten using MOP, which is quite usable in CMUCL 19a. The first step has been to write object indexes using MOP. You can find the code in bknr/src/indices and the tutorial as a pdf at http://bl0rg.net/~manuel/tutorial.pdf).
BKNR is still quite fragile on the API side, as it is mostly used for our own projects, but we plan to do a 'stable developer beta' in a few weeks for the next Hamburg meeting."
