weblocks site down? also newbie questions
eof
and am hoping this community can help me find my way.
I was a young, maybe talented programmer, ended up dropping out of
school, doing other things and randomly fell back into making websites/
CMS stuff. I have been doing Drupal for about a year, I never wrote
any php before I started this.. mostly C++, some perl and java as
well.
I'm 26 and am in a good position still to learn (no responsibilities
really). I want to be in the best position possible to write solid,
fast web apps that can do anything. I want to be able to develop them
as quickly as possible.
Drupal is okay, RoR is fast to develop but doesn't really feel right
to me. I have been scouring the internet trying to find the right
place to devote a lot of effort to. I don't know python or lisp and I
am only slightly comfortable with ruby, but I am willing to put in the
work to learn.
I am scared of putting a lot of effort into something stale or backing
myself into a corner. The weblocks website seems to have been down
for at least 24 hours now, which is scary to me.
Alien technology.. is it really that awesome?
Leslie P. Polzer
eof wrote:
> I don't want to make this too long but I am sort of on a search here
> and am hoping this community can help me find my way.
Welcome!
> I'm 26 and am in a good position still to learn (no responsibilities
> really). I want to be in the best position possible to write solid,
> fast web apps that can do anything. I want to be able to develop them
> as quickly as possible.
>
>
> Drupal is okay, RoR is fast to develop but doesn't really feel right
> to me. I have been scouring the internet trying to find the right
> place to devote a lot of effort to. I don't know python or lisp and I
> am only slightly comfortable with ruby, but I am willing to put in the
> work to learn.
>
> I am scared of putting a lot of effort into something stale or backing
> myself into a corner.
Weblocks development and support is quite active as you will see when
you browse the messages in this group and the commit log at Bitbucket.
Newly found bugs are usually fixed within days.
Work on new features and documentation has been slow in the last few
months, but that shouldn't be a problem if you seriously want to make
the effort to learn and use Weblocks.
People have built complex public sites with Weblocks.
As for Lisp itself you will find a lot of friendly people helping you
on Freenode's #lisp and lispforum.com.
> The weblocks website seems to have been down for at least 24 hours now,
> which is scary to me.
That's got nothing to do with Weblocks itself, actually.
I had to restart the site's server several times in the last few
days and just forgot to start the site this time. Yeah, I really
should put that on auto.
> Alien technology.. is it really that awesome?
It is. You hardly ever want to go back. ;)
Weblocks makes you feel you're taking the most effective path for
most of them time, and you don't get to repeat yourself often.
There are missing features but you will get all the help you need
to add them here.
Leslie
Rayservers
>
> Weblocks makes you feel you're taking the most effective path for
> most of them time, and you don't get to repeat yourself often.
This is true of lisp in general. Our current site is running Portable
Allegroserve and GBBOpen for a in memory DB. It is moving to Weblocks.
Its faster to write an application in lisp than it is to install and figure out
whats going on in many cases with other languages.
See Paul Graham's famous essay: http://paulgraham.com/avg.htm
We have an ambitious project, we will use weblocks as the web engine for
rendering GBBopen objects. Source will be released when we have something to
demonstrate. First step is CMS-like. Back to work on it, I only get a few hours
a week at the moment on this. "Sometime soon", it will have paid staff working
on it.
Cheers,
---Venkat.
eof
part of what got me really intrigued about lisp in the first place. I
will spend the next few days pouring over Practical Common Lisp which
is sitting here in hard copy on my desk.
Geoff
Ray
It is said, any sufficiently advanced application re-implements half of lisp.
Any sufficiently advanced lisp application re-implements much of GBBopen. The
original GBB was so far ahead of its time... Take elephant, for instance -
almost a re-implementation of a blackboard. There are so many name space and
utilities duplicated. GBBopen as an extension to lisp provides you in-memory
object management (full MOP plus GBBopen extensions), thread management,
sockets, coarse gain scheduling, dynamic re-ordering of execution, and the
blackboard for incremental problem solving with multi-lisp, multi-operating
system compatibility layers. GBBopen is also the perfect framework to wrapper-in
lots of disparate systems written in other languages.
Weblocks provides a nice way to render lisp objects in general via the web.
First some background thinking on re-distributing computing:
The Web as the UI
The web has become the preferred UI for any reasonably complex application -
because hyperlinked text is a richer and more powerful way to express and
exchange information. The other advantage of the web is the stateless
high-latency way of expressing information that is rendered remotely. An
advantage? Yes, compared to X-windows, the web wins. It also allows for
client-server separation of processing allowing PCs with advanced operating
systems to just become glorified VT220s connected via SSL to central
"mainframes". See this screed on SSL - http://iang.org/ssl
De-centralizing the web - or putting the crypto in people's hands.
The SSL web model results in the e-gold and Gmail model. Big brother can index
your email and see all your transactions, allege thought and money crimes at
will. It also results in huge multi-billion dollar data warehouses for analysing
all this. Solutions - In brief, PGP wins over S/MIME, OTR over PGP and ZRTP over
SRTP+TLS. In short, the crypto must happen on the PC, and the PC must be secure.
Putting the web into the computer
Imagine a suggestion that a better, richer experience will come from a higher
latency web where all the low latency information is on your computer!
Solving this involves solving the tragedy of the commons - or why freenet, tor
etc., have failed as technologies. It also involves thinking about persistence,
memory management, scheduling, queues... to software distribution plus messaging
and money.
Moving the web server onto the PC.
Content on the server on the PC can just as handily hyperlink to http content on
the web if the PC is connected and this is desired. If not, those pages can be
retrieved asynchronously. This allows the integration of a whole new set of "web
address space" that is on DHT.
Solving the ecommerce problem
Current day ecommerce is built on a "tell the merchant your secret swiss account
number" model. He'll take just enough and send you your stuff. This is layered
upon a massive financial ponzi fraud scheme, the USD. See blog for screeds on
the fraud, money and what is lawful, and what is meaning of freedom (as in "I
live in a free country"). Proposed solutions are described on http://gsf.li/
Getting started
Ahem. We need a UI. Here comes Weblocks. UI gotta say hello. Here comes a CMS in
weblocks. People need to communicate and trade.... all that to follow.
This stuff will have a project website once the CMS is ready, and a dev mailing
list. The code will be a Weblocks application, hence this post.
On 10/18/09 22:30, eof wrote:
> Thank you for your answers. I have read that essay and it was a big
> part of what got me really intrigued about lisp in the first place. I
> will spend the next few days pouring over Practical Common Lisp which
> is sitting here in hard copy on my desk.
>
> Geoff
Cheers,
---Venkat.
http://www.rayservers.com/
http://www.global-settlement.org/