FIXME: fill in the ... above, perhaps by making the setf a seperate function or something so it can be talked about independently]]> Fri, 23 Apr 2010 03:28:34 +0100 http://teddyb.org/rlp/tiki-index.php?page=Weblocks+Tutorial+Blog .diffchar { color:red; } +

The Setup

Well, it's been ages since I wrote Learning About Weblocks,+ and I've forgotten everything, and it's probably half obsolete+ anyways.+

In April 2010, I went around honestly trying to be language agnostic+ and to look for good web programming frameworks. I was quite+ surprised to find nothing that seemed even remotely as advanced as+ Weblocks. I had assume that,+ for example, Ruby On Rails would be close, since people seem to+ think it is quite impressive, so I was very surprised to see raw+ HTML in the first few pages of an RoR tutorial. That just seems so+ ... primitive after using Weblocks.+

But, on the other hand, the documentation is atrocious. The+ community is decently responsive, but that can only make up for some+ much opacity in the docs, especially since my next project is+ something I'd like other people to be able to freely help with.+

There's also the fact that Lisp is hard for a lot of people, and while I find it syntactically enjoyable, I have real trouble with using it seriously (trying to actually use and understand continuations f'reals makes my head explode, for example).+

The Plan

So, this is my thought: I'll write a not-too-complicated sample+ application in Weblocks, without the added overhead of my usual+ BDD+ programming style, and blog the process as a tutorial.+

Some possible results:+

• A great weblocks tutorial, good enough to point to people that I might like to help me with my project+
• I get so annoyed with not being able to understand weblocks that I toss it away and use Ruby On Rails like a sane person+
• I eventually wander off to another project with no real outcome+

The Tutorial Application

The standard here is a block or a wiki. And I'm fine with that, but weblocks really shines when you give it a decent amount of data to work with, and both blogs and wikis tend to just have a few entries, at least for tutorials.+

A friend suggested a recipe manager instead, and that's what I'm going to do. Eventually, the idea is to have wiki-style editing of recipes and ingredient information, links between ingredients and recipes, and other nifty stuff like that.+

I'm going to start simple, though, and deliberately am not planning ahead at all: I want to see how weblocks deals with major design changes. As a for example, I'm going to start by having the user explicitely link recipes to ingredients, but my intention is that eventually linking ingredients will just be a bit of wiki markup and the ingredients list will auto-generate.+

The Blog Entries

• Weblocks Tutorial Blog #1+