Some feedback about the The Common Lisp Directory project. (And no, it's not in Python... ;-)

"Marc Battyani" <Marc.Battyani@fractalconcept.com> wrote

>A short announcement: Some of you have might have already noticed the
> use of URLs for the Common Lisp Directory that indicate that Python
> code is used.

As most of you have probably found out now, the switch of the Common Lisp
Directory to Python was only effective on April First. ;-)

Here are some feedback and real life data from the Common Lisp Directory
project.

Hardware: 1Gb Dual Intel Xeon 2.80GHz Debian box.
Software: Apache+mod_lisp+Lispworks

Some data taken on April 2 (in decreasing order :):

42 041 200 Hits since the Dec 15 2005 (start of the linkit project)!

41 997 354 Hits served by the same Lisp process, the other ones are the
logo/jpg etc. (with a max at 930K hits/day and several days with more than
800K hits)

34591 user sessions (robots excluded)

612 registered users

589 items:
  287 Libraries/Tools/Software
  155 People
  101 Documents/Web sites
   22 Implementations
   15 Groups/Organizations
    9 Events

First some explanation about why so many hits:
As some of you already know, my framework is intended for complex real time
collaborative applications and for that there is a 2 seconds Ajax like keep
alive/bidirectional connection. In the case of a public application like the
cl-directory this continuous connection is not useful but induces a lots of
hits. For now, I've reduced the connection frequency to 5 seconds and I will
suppress it completely for all the non interactive pages in the future.

Anyway this highlights the rock solid stability and reliability of a Lisp
webapp. The Lisp image is the same one from December. It has never crashed,
though the application have evolved from linkit (an improved reddit like
app) to the cl-directory with several versions that have completely changed
the applicative and object model.

> server application based on Common Lisp to one based on Python. The
> reason is that we had some problems with regard to multithreading and
> the HTML code generation utilities that we use.

On the contrary, the hability to blend the HTML generation in the Lisp code
through HTML macros is far better than every alternative that I know of.

[...]
> Needless to say
> that we stand fully committed behind Common Lisp and especially the
> Common Lisp Directory, due to its popularity with users and its
> recognition in major search engines (Google, etc.) in a very short
> amount of time.

At least that part of the message is true. After only 2.5 month with some
real content, the Common Lisp Directory already consistently appears in the
very first links for a lot of common lisp related searches on Google.
Sometimes it's even the first one!

So don't worry, the CLD will stay in Common Lisp and will continue to
improve. The next version (when I find some time to play with this) will
enable anybody to edit the CLD content but still in a moderated way to avoid
being spammed

In the mean time you can already add notes and comments to the directory
pages and of course submit new pages.

BTW some people have complained that they could not edit their own
libraries/persons/etc. entries. In that case just send us an email with your
cl-directory user login name and we will give you the modification rights
you want.

As a conclusion, I would say that Common Lisp has once again proven to be a
very good way to very quickly build rock solid and reliable web
applications.

Marc