Greetings Weblocks users, I have been quite successful using Weblocks to build a web application and I thought I would introduce it on this list and provide some additional information about how I use Weblocks. Maybe this information will be useful to newcomers and I'd love to get some feedback :-)
My application is called SnappyVote, http://snappyvote.com, and is meant to be a general purpose voting application. The basic idea is you build a ballot with choices and then invite your friends to vote on it. This can be useful for a variety of applications, like voting on where to go for lunch, or what is the greatest movie of all time or 'Employee of the Month'. Right now it is alpha quality but it is being used by several people already. I plan on extending it to allow additional voting types like ranked list, yes/no, to do surveys and provide web widgets that you can embed into blogs or facebook or whatever. Now a little bit about how I use Weblocks. I started using Weblocks when it was relatively new and used it for several small projects. I also tried other lisp web frameworks (uncommon web, plain hunchentoot) and found that Weblocks made the most sense to me. It was quite a learning curve and I did a lot of things wrong in the beginning. At times I got incredibly frustrated with it but somewhere in the process everything just clicked and I have been productive ever sense. One thing I learned fairly early on is the bundled widgets were great for quickly prototyping UI but when it comes to customizing the behavior they are fairly limited. This is *not* really a problem because building custom widgets is not that hard. So every widget in SnappyVote, except maybe forms, are all custom. I do not use any of the continuation-based flow stuff like do-widget except for maybe one or two places. While they do make some things cleaner, IMHO I dont think they are necessary and, at least for me, they caused more headache than what they were worth. I recommend that newcomers stay away from these things unless there is a good reason to use them. YMMV. I use Elephant with the BDB backend and I like it a lot. It was very easy for me to understand the basics and I like defining my data in terms of CLOS and not tables. The only thing I'd recommend is staying away from is associations as they seem to break under some conditions. If the site outgrows Elephant I will probably refactor my db code to use postmodern. For unit testing I use stefil, mostly for its simplicity and my familiarity working with it on other projects. I have had great success using cl-selenium with stefil for UI testing. cl-selenium is quite stable and very easy to set up. I cannot recommend this enough and I was surprised that there is no mention of it on the weblocks site or on this mailing list. In addition to unit testing, I use SBCL's sb-cover library to get code coverage for my unit tests. sb-cover has a nice form-by-form color-coded report that shows me exactly which code paths are missed in my unit tests. Again, highly recommended! Well, that's it. Again, feedback is welcome and I hope this is helpful to some of you. Thanks! Anthony -- 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.
