Webmachine – HTTP Semantic Awareness on top of Hunchentoot

Webmachine is an application layer that adds HTTP semantic awareness on top of the excellent bit-pushing and HTTP syntax-management provided by Hunchentoot, and provides a simple and clean way to connect that to your application's behavior.

Webmachine maps the various aspects of the HTTP protocol to generic methods which are customisable. For instance, content negotiation, authorization and caching are orthogonally separated and an application using Webmachine can easily describe desired beahviours in testable and reusable application TRAITS, then blend them together in actual web resources.

The design is inspired by the mythic Webmachine of Erlang and honours it with that name.

This software is Copyright © 2018–2023 Michaël Le Barbier and is distributed under the terms described in the LICENSE file. External contributions distributed in the asset folder are distributed under their own terms.

Alpha Software

This is Alpha software and work in progress and system's interface is likely to change. Join the conversation on the home repository if that happens.

Porting is not complete but authorization and content negotiation are available. Webmachine can serve simple web applications already and an Example is provided.

Example

The system org.melusina.webmachine/example is a simple application example of a web application written with Webmachine.

Cl-USER> (ql:quickload "org.melusina.webmachine/example")
Cl-USER> (org.melusina.webmachine/example:create-users)
Cl-USER> (org.melusina.webmachine/example:start)

Browse to http://localhost:8080/about to interact with the application.

The systems org.melusina.webmachine/asset and org.melusina.webmachine/server contain general functions that can be interesting to Webmachine users when driving their own experiments.

Testsuite

The system org.melusina.webmachine/testsuite implements a testsuite. Run it with:

Cl-USER> (ql:quickload "org.melusina.webmachine/testsuite")
Cl-USER> (org.melusina.webmachine/testsuite:run-all-tests)
…
Name: ORG.MELUSINA.WEBMACHINE/TESTSUITE:RUN-ALL-TESTS
Total: 159
Success: 159/159 (100%)
Failure: 0/159 (0%)
Condition: 0/159 (0%)
Outcome: Success

GitHub Actions run the testsuite on every push to the repository.

Development

The system org.melusina.webmachine/development provides developer tools, most importantly a linter and a file template.

Cl-USER> (ql:quickload "org.melusina.webmachine/development")
Cl-USER> (org.melusina.webmachine/development:lint)

Join the Conversation

If you are interested in Webmachine, try to use it, want to contribute, join the conversation!

• GitHub Issues
• IRC #commonlisp, see community pointers

Other Webmachine Implementations

• Erlang
• OCaml
• Python