npsimons / land-of-lisp-using-hunchentoot

Convert code for "Dice of Doom" from Barski's "Land of Lisp" to use Hunchentoot web server.

"Land of Lisp" using Hunchentoot

Convert code for "Dice of Doom" from "Land of Lisp" to use Hunchentoot web server for version 3 and 4.

I recently went through "Land of Lisp" by Conrad Barski, a thoroughly enjoyable book! Unfortunately, I couldn't get the web server in the book working, even when I tried the code from the website (to make sure I didn't fat finger something). I had previously gone through "Lisp for the Web" by Adam Tornhill, where he used Hunchentoot, and the callback handlers seemed similar enough, so I went ahead and converted it.

A few notes:

1. I used QuickLisp when implementing, then switched to ASDF; either will work, use whatever you're comfortable with. I left the quicklisp code in, commented out, and ASDF seems to "just work" with less fuss, probably because I'm on Debian and installed the cl-hunchentoot package.
2. There's not much difference in the handlers; I had to redirect the *standard-output* stream as in the original, but because Hunchentoot appears to just grab returned strings and I'm new to Hunchentoot, I used a stringstream and returned a string from that at the end of the handler.
3. A lot of stuff is just taken care of by Hunchentoot (as any decent server side will do), so you don't need to gin up your own Content-type or HTTP/1.1 header (which was missing in the original "Dice of Doom" code). This includes path and parameter parsing, so chosen becomes a string if it's not nil.
4. I shamelessly stole some convenience functions for starting and stopping Hunchentoot; link is in the comment above them.
5. I also took the liberty of changing some identifierssymbols. I believe in code readbility, touch type and use Emacs with dabbrev-expand religiously, so I see no reason to shorten names.

The relevant change is here.

Beware! I am learning, so there may still be issues with this code. I also have to apologize for the sloppiness of the repository history. I wasn't planning on releasing this publicly and it was mainly as a safety net and I was focused on learning the language, not Git. I swear my shared repositories don't usually look this bad!