You can skip this section if you already have a comfortable Common Lisp environment.
First you must choose a Common Lisp implementation.
Weblocks is designed and implemented to be portable and should run on the most popular Common Lisp implementations. It is currently tested best on SBCL and Clozure CL, though.
There are at least two fundamentally different development approaches for using Common Lisp:
Editor-centric development: you access all Lisp functions from within your editor.
Example: Emacs/Slime, Vim/Slimv, Lispworks/IDE.
Incremental development happens mainly on the S-Expression level. This means that you edit a SEXP and send it with the help of editor directly to your Lisp image, which evaluates it, thus affecting the current Lisp environment.
UNIX-style development: one tool for each job. The editor is not all that important here (as long as you’re comfortable with it and it supports at least a basic level of paren highlighting.
Example: Vim and your favorite terminal emulator. You start Vim in one window and your Lisp in another. Interaction happens by reloading your applications ASDF system and simple copy/paste of snippets.
We will try to be largely agnostic of the development approach in this manual which actually means that we tend towards the second approach: Lisp calls are referred to by what you’d type in your REPL, not by Emacs shortcut as it is often the case.
For a basic comfortable SBCL setup, see Basic SBCL setup.
Note
The official quicklisp distribution contains an old Weblocks version.
This documentation is about newer Weblocks, built from
reblocks branch. It is only available on the
Ultralisp.org.
The easiest way to install Weblocks and additional libraries is to use https://ultralisp.org distribution. It is Quicklisp compatible. To install Weblocks from Ultralisp, do eval these commands in your REPL:
CL-USER> (ql-dist:install-dist "http://dist.ultralisp.org/"
:prompt nil)
CL-USER> (ql:quickload :weblocks)
If you are using Qlot to pin versions, you can add such lines into your
qlfile:
dist ultralisp http://dist.ultralisp.org/
ql :all :latest
ultralisp :all :latest
Run qlot update after these changes, and new Weblocks will be
available to install.