Uncommon Web "Hello World" Tutorial Movie
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Marco Baringer (the creator of Uncommon Web (UCW), a continuation-based web application development framework), has announced a "Hello World" movie that he has made to demonstrate basic usage of his UCW package. UCW does have substantial documentation; however, it has been criticized in the past for being difficult for a new user to understand. This movie should help to get people started with basic use of the framework. The movie is the first movie (in what, hopefully, will be a series of movies) that provides entry-level detail about developing with UCW. There is a need for tutorial-type movies such as this one to fill the gap between written documentation and experience with a CL package. But, as Frederick Dominicus says:
"Unfortunately it just shows the easy part. It does not reveal how action, tal-files etc come into play. It does not give a good development approach or an idea on how to develop new components. It's IMHO in the same league as the Squeak Seaside tutorial.."Note that Frederick isn't saying that the movie isn't worthwhile, just that there is so much to the UCW framework that there are a lot of additional topics that could be covered in future movies!
As with the Rainer Joswig video, it is interesting to watch the movie (even if you aren't particularly interested in UCW), just to see how an experienced Lisper writes Lisp code.
The movie and torrent are available from:
http://common-lisp.net/movies/hello-world.mov
http://common-lisp.net/movies/hello-world.torrent
Update-2005-07-28: Marco pointed out in an email to me that he "ended up creating two movies, the first one (announced in the email you linked to) was a huge 233mb file and was done without much thought (i just started talking and writing). the second one (the .mov and .torrent on cl.net) is substantially smaller (a "mere" 51mb) and a bit clearer". He also indicated that "the movies are different and that there's such a large size difference between the two, and that, imho, the smaller version is better". Therefore, if you previously downloaded the 233MB movie, you might want to download the "updated version" using one of the links above.
Update-2005-09-11: The location of the movie and the torrent have changed, so I've updated the URL's for both.
Update-2008-01-31: Peter Christensen wrote a review and a transcript of Marco Barringer's UCW "Hello World" movie.
