Common Lisp Hypermedia Server (CL-HTTP)

Last updated October 18, 2006

What's New

Prerelease 70.216: Looking for beta-testers for the ports to LispWorks 5.0, MCL 5.1, SCL, ACL 8 (jkf), especially the advanced features for SSL and the proxy in LW 5.0 (October 18, 2006). Contact the developers. Other ports coming soon.
New Web Site: Thanks to generous donations and some hard work, a new CL-HTTP distribution Web site is taking shape. Expect this to match the previous AI Lab infrastructure, and then, surpass it.

Release 70.190a is available for most platforms (December 17, 2003). This includes significant performance improvements, particularly on LispWorks, the Lisp Machine and Macintosh platforms, many new features, and numerous bug fixes.

Major components include a mature HTTP 1.1 server, a robust caching proxy server, a programmatic client, a constraint-guided Web Walker, a full-text indexation & retrieval, along with a variety of Web-related tools and contributions.

Mature, production-quality ports are available running over LispWorks on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, or LINUX & UNIX, which share the same cross-platform development environment and offer royality-free runtimes!.

Completely free systems are available running CMU Common Lisp under FreeBSD & LINUX over x86 hardware.

Benefits

Enables production Web applications written in ANSI Common Lisp.

Comprehensive standards-compliance for HTTP 1.1 & HTML generation.

Runs on major Lisp implementations over major operating systems.

Designed for portability & source compatibility across Lisp implementations.

High-productivity development of sophisticated Web applications.

Highly customizable, high-quality and extensive implementation.

Rapid prototyping for research, product or protocol development.

Easy evolution of applications & site maintenance.

Simplified management of complexity.

CL-HTTP is a full-featured server for the Internet Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP 1.1, HTML 2.0, 3.2 & 4.0.1) that comes complete with source code. The server has been proven in major production systems, applied in a number of Artificial Intelligence systems, and used in top research laboratories around the world. Some major features of the server include:

HTTP 1.1 Compliant Server, Caching Proxy (HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SNEWS), Reverse Proxy, advanced Web Walker, programmatic Client, and many tools for Web development.

Computed URLs written in Lisp supersede conventional CGI scripts and provide more power than Java Servlets.

HTML Synthesis for XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.0 & with generation tools, including backward compatibility to earlier HTML standards (3.2, 2.0).

Server-side includes (SHTML) incorporate dynamic content into static Web pages.

Implements GET, HEAD, POST, PUT, DELETE, OPTIONS, TRACE, CONNECT methods.

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) support for server, client, proxy & Web walker.

SSL X.509 client certificate support for server, client & Web walker.

Presentation-based Interfaces with W3P.

Modular & extensible logging.

Persistent Connections for the server & the basic client.

HTTP 1.1 Virtual Hosts sharing a single IP address.

Multiple IP address support.

Reverse Proxy Support, including dynamic URL remapping.

Access Control via subnets, passwords (Basic & HTTP 1.1 Digest Authentication) & X.509 certificates.

Java & JavaScript support.

W4 Constraint-Guided Web Walker.

Email Hyperarchive Facility.

Site Indexing & Information Retrieval with LambdaVista

Web-based configuration of the server & user access control.

Multi-threaded and dynamically linked.

Extensible, modular, object-oriented architecture.

Advanced condition handling architecture.

Dynamically generated reference manual.

Working examples to get you started.

Rich toolkit of Web abstractions.

Clean abstractions facilitate security audits.

Mobility support, including disconnected operation on laptops.

Digitally signed distributions.

Source compatible over major hardware, operating-system and Lisp platforms.

Complete source code.

Freely distributed since 1994.

Royalty-free, production-quality, cross-platform application delivery on LispWorks with commercial support availability.

Information

WWW-94 Conference Paper: ``Common Lisp Hypermedia Server'' overviews the motivation and architecture of the server.
Documentation: The distribution comes with more detailed online documentation and examples. The discussion in the listserve archives may be useful. The resources page points to Web documentation, general Common Lisp resources and tutorials on the net.
Questions: If you have questions, send mail to www-cl@csail.mit.edu.
WWW-95 Conference Paper: ``The Open Meeting: A Web-Based System for Conferencing and Collaboration'' overviews a major application in wide-area collaboration that uses CL-HTTP.

DOW-96 Conference Papers:

``A Constraint-Guided Web Walker for Specialized Activities'' introduces a new control architecture for Web walkers that builds on the basic client distributed with CL-HTTP.

``W3P: A Portable Presentation System for the World-Wide Web'' describes a light-weight, portable presentation system that emphasizes speedy translation between application data structures and user interfaces.

Contact

Contact various people associated with CL-HTTP via email or the list server for the user community.

Users: Community

Developers: Bug Reports

Webmaster: Webmaster@no-spam.cl-http.org

About CL-HTTP.org