Re: Web development

[MJ Ray]

Sergey:
> I don't know what S-expressions are. Are they  have DTD?

They're just our friendly bracketed lists.  Useful for all purposes.

>  XML - is "standard" aproch.

XML is a W3C recommendation.  Scheme has an IEEE standard.  Which is more
standard?  (And who cares? S-expr and XML are roughly equivalent, anyway. 
No sense spending time using XML parsers if your components can handle
S-exprs.)

> The problem is to rollback "cached objects".
>  I've collected some data from database in goops objects. Afterwards
>  I have modified it and rollback. It is too expecive getting objects
>  from database everytime isn't it? So we are having two copies of
>  objects -- in guile and database and they must by synchronisied.

I'm still confused by this.  Yes, it is relatively expensive, but if you
have a transaction underway in one database connection, you can't reliably
take objects obtained over other connections and expect to keep integrity,
if I understand it correctly.

> You need set of html-generating functions? Make it youself and you will
> never find youself in troubles of spending time in hacking another library.

LAML is already out there... another thing I must try.

>  If you need a high-level schemish tool to make out entire web site --
>  look for HB, as it was advised in the list. It is a great tool.

Yes, I will look at HB.  It looks quite promising as far as that model of
operations goes.

> I was tring to invent a big application server and this is another task i
> have no enough brains for.

Yes, I'm probably being over-ambitious.  My hope was to break the
page-script equivalence by using something like the send/suspend seen in the
PLT webserver with the better library support of guile.  Whether breaking
that equivalence is a good idea, or whether explicit state-saving with
sessions is a better idea is a dilemma I don't have the answer to yet.

> And, sorry, but i have to give up with this thread -- I lack 
> good thoughts and have almost no free time :) -- but will read your
> answer eventualy.

Aw, that's a shame.  I thought some of your thoughts were quite interesting.
-- 
MJR