03 Aug 2007

Experience Report: Scheme in Commercial Web Application Development

posted by Noel

Our paper “Experience Report: Scheme in Commercial Web Application Development” is online. As the title suggests, it describes our experiences over the past year developing a number of web-based applications in PLT Scheme. If we’d chosen a language like Java or Ruby we could have used a large number of libraries developed for web apps, whereas PLT Scheme has relatively few libraries in this area, and they haven’t been tested under high load. So we were gambling that Scheme would make us so productive we could develop our own libraries and the applications we were contracted to produce in the same time it would take to develop just the applications in another language. It was a gamble that paid off. You’ll have to read the paper for all the details, but suffice to say we delivered the applications on time (and more are in development) and our libraries already compare well against big names like Ruby on Rails and J2EE.

On thing that got cut from the paper was our use of Flapjax is parts of the interface. If you write complicated Javascript to take a look at it. It really does simplify event handling, and our code using Flapjax is half the size of our original code without it.

Update: This is more or less the same post as on Untyping


Does anyone happen to know the scale of the use of scheme or lisp as a web side server language used by MIT’s Electrical Engineering Computer Science department in 6.001 or other classes?

Aaron, 8 August 2007


I took 6.001 in in the Spring of 2005, and we did not use scheme (our variant was MIT Scheme) for any server-side scripting. Come to think of it, we didn’t do much of any server-side work, although we built a web crawler as a project.

Brad, 19 September 2007


Great.Thank you for the Report. what is the difference commercial and business Web Application Development.

suhan, 2 December 2011


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