I was recently reminded of a presentation that I gave last year about Weblocks.
Here’s one slide from that presentation:
Today, I started from scratch in an empty account on an eight-year-old Linux box. I installed Quicklisp and used it to install Weblocks. I had a Weblocks server up and running in under three minutes.
One of the things that my current work does better than anywhere I’ve worked before is logging. When something goes wrong, there is a log file that you can dig through to find all kinds of information about what you were doing and how things were going.
As I move forward programming a game with my UNet library, I want to make sure that I can easily log all the network traffic during testing runs at least.
In looking through the various Lisp logging packages out there, I decided on Nick Levine’s cl-log library.
I installed it in no time with quicklisp.
Then, I set to work trying to figure out how I could use it to log binary data.
Here’s what I ended up with. If you want to do something similar, this should give you a good starting point.
With my USerial library, I defined a serializer to keep track of the different categories of log messages. And, I made corresponding categories in cl-log.
There are two major classes that I specialized: base-message and base-messenger. For my toying around, I didn’t end up adding any functionality to the base-message class. I will show it here though so that you know you can do it.
Then, I overrode the messenger-send-message generic function to create a binary header with my USerial library and then write the header and the message out.
To get things going, I then made a log manager that accepts my serialized-message type and started one of my serialized-messenger instances.
Once these were started, I made a little utility function to make it easy for me to make test messages and then invoked log-message a few times.
In all, it has taken me about four times as long to write blog post as it did to install cl-log with quicklisp, peek through the cl-log documentation and source code enough to figure out how to do this, and write all of the code.
To really use this, I will probably separate out the category of a message from the serialized type of the message. This will probably involve adding a field to the serialized-message class to track the message type, adding an initialize-instance :before method for that class to look through the arguments to pull out the type, and then adding the type as an extra argument to log-message.
I installed Quicklisp tonight. It was super-simple. In about 1/2 an hour, I got slime up and running and installed all of the packages that I regularly use.
It installs itself in a quicklisp/ subdirectory of your home directory. I didn’t really want it cluttering up my normal ls output, so I moved it to .quicklisp/ and updated my .sbclrc to refer to this new path. It had to recompile everything when I loaded it next, but it handled it gracefully.
It took me less than a minute to get slime set up. This is an improvement of about five hours and fifty-nine minutes over the previous time that I set up slime.
I definitely give my two thumbs up for Quicklisp.
Thanks, Zach!