I've deployed a weblocks-based site -- http://aulapolska.pl/
Unfortunately, it does not have an english version. It is a site for a barcamp-like initiative. Think of it as a conference engine, for building a community, handling conferences and building an archive of talks. Something like ted.com, just on a smaller scale. I thought some experiences might be useful to other people using weblocks, so here goes. The good: -- it works, -- it doesn't leak memory, or at least not as much that I'd notice, -- it runs reasonably well on an old Athlon with 512MB RAM, which does lots of other things, -- it is reasonably easy to add new features without a complexity explosion (an example -- AJAXy star ratings: 3 hours), -- the admin interface is straightforward to write because of the view system, -- PostgreSQL really shines and saves the day. the bad: -- performance sucks and this needs to be worked on (4.5 pages per second is nothing to write home about), -- common lisp still lives in a pre-unicode world, I don't know why SBCL crashes and burns when I press control-c, and before I set my locale SBCL wouldn't even compile my source files, -- I can't figure out what the performance problems are because the SBCL profiler doesn't work for me, -- the whole session redirect thing causes search engines to index wrong URLs, this needs to be solved, -- it is obvious that very few people actually deployed weblocks applications. other limitations: -- presentations are severely limited because they are not widgets, -- views are cool, except when you run into their limitations (see above), -- weblocks is sprinkled with english user-visible strings, which is a huge problem, -- I can't figure out how to get gridedit to sort on a slot from another object (it insists on getting everything from a single table), which makes it considerably less useful for the admin interface, -- I found scaffolding to be completely useless in real-life scenarios. I don't have a single scaffolded view left. -- the idea of rendering HTML to a stream isn't necessarily a very good one, as you can't render out of order, and juggling string streams isn't always what you want to do, Oh, and a hint. If you ever work with a designer, you'll have a huge problem explaining why your pages are not just huge database-filled templates and why you want the same widget to look the same (or close) on every web page. Tell him your widgets are Photoshop "smart objects" and observe the light bulb above his head. Had I known this, it would have saved me days of explaining. --J. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weblocks" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/weblocks?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
