Hunchentoot and packages

Over the past couple of years I've been experimenting with a number of CL
http servers and have recently turned to hunchentoot as my platform of choice
which, like the rest of Edi's packages, has found it's way into my heart.

One of the things I've often found rather annoying however (not with
Hunchentoot specifically, this is present in all of the CL web servers
I've experimented with) is that publishing a URL is a twofold process:

a) define your handler function (or something similar) and
b) register that handler with a particular URL.

Now all this becomes a little repetitive so here is a new publisher function
which allows you to publish your package on a particular URL so that any
requests to URL's 'below' that one will be resolved to a function in your package.

We play on one of the less remarked upon CL features (or lack of restrictions)
which allows symbols to start with a #\/ (a forward slash, to those not used to
the CL character macro reader) so we can publish our package on /test define a
function named /foo and automagically have requests to /test/foo mapped
to our /foo handler.

(modified 30/5/2007 16:00)
eg.

(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :hunchentoot)
(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :cl-who)

(defpackage :pack-test (:use :cl :hunchentoot :cl-who))
(in-package :pack-test)


(defun index ()
  #'(lambda ()
      (with-html-output-to-string (x)
        (:html "The index page"))))

(defun seq-last (seq)
  (aref seq (1- (length seq))))

(defun string->handler (string package)
  (when (string= string "/") (return-from string->handler (index)))
  (multiple-value-bind (sym type) (find-symbol string package)
    (when (and (not (eql type :inherited))
               (fboundp sym))
      (symbol-function sym))))
                                  
(defun create-package-dispatcher (prefix)
  (check-type prefix string)
  (assert (eql (seq-last prefix) #\/) (prefix) "Prefix must end in a / (forward slash)")
  #'(lambda (request)
      (let* ((function (script-name request))
             (mismatch (mismatch (script-name request) prefix
                                 :test #'char=)))
        (when (or (null mismatch)
                  (>= mismatch (length prefix)))
          (string->handler (string-upcase (subseq function (1- (length prefix))))
                           *package*)))))

(push (create-package-dispatcher "/test/") *dispatch-table*)

(defun /index ()
  (with-html-output-to-string (out)
    (:html (:head (:title "Welcome"))
           (:body (:h2 "This is my welcome page")))))

(defvar *server* (start-server :port 8080))

and now browsing to http://localhost:8080/test/index should give you a
nice new welcome page and adding a new URL is a simple 1 step process.


---
This post is courtesy of lispworks(5.0.2), hunchentoot(0.9.2) and cl-who (0.4.4)

asdf-install & Windows

Thanks to Nate's latest release of archive we can now use asdf-install on Windows
without resorting to cygwin or gnu-tar. Just add the following to your .asdf-install.

(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :gzip-stream)
(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op :archive :version "0.6")

(defun asdf-install-extractor (to-dir tarball)
(let ((name nil))
  (gzip-stream:with-open-gzip-file (ins tarball)
    (archive:with-open-archive (archive ins)
      (let ((*default-pathname-defaults* (pathname to-dir)))
        (archive:do-archive-entries (entry archive name)
          (archive:extract-entry archive entry)
          (unless name (setf name (archive:name entry)))))))
  ;; we use string instead of namestring because
  ;; asdf-install searches for /'s and not \'s
  ;; which will break on windows
  (string name)))

(push 'asdf-install-extractor asdf-install:*tar-extractors*)

You will still get an error along the lines of
"'gpg' is not recognized as an internal or external command,"
but select the continue restart and all should be fine and dandy.


---
This post is courtesy of lispworks(5.0.2), gzip-stream(0.1), asdf-install(0.5.5) and archive(0.6).