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Comment by sum1changdmypwd | Hacker News Reader

I think there's a big space missing in learning to make web applications (this doesn't fill it). We often see material about the raw stuff (js,ajax,css), but we don't see material that focusses on HOW you should use that raw stuff. This is the most important part.

This course uses Rails, so I imagine you get a good overview of how you do stuff....but that's just how Rails says you should.

Does anyone have framework agnostic material that talks on a higher level about how we should be doing things?

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It sounds like you are looking for Software Engineering for Internet Applications.

http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/

I am working through this book right now, very slowly since I have a lot of other stuff going on right now. Links to my source code so far, as well as my running website-in-progress, are below.

http://github.com/ericlavigne/seia

http://lavigne-seia.heroku.com/

I'm still at the part of the book where it provides guidelines for selecting tools (I chose Sinatra, Sequel, and Heroku), and exercises to become more comfortable with those tools. The next chapter is about planning.

Seconded. I just finished the first chapter of this book and it's really worth it.

I want to complete a project using Common Lisp. And I'm using Hunchentoot as a webserver, Postgresql as a database and the Postmodern library to interact with it.

Is your code hosted someplace that we could watch the project unfold?

Well, I wrote a simple blog engine after finishing the chapter although I don't use a database here, the blog is saved directly to disk (http://github.com/l0stman/Blog).

The biggest hurdle with Common Lisp is configuring the system correctly because there's no out of the box solution. Although there's a lot of library -- http://www.cliki.net is a great resource -- figuring out how to use asdf-install is a bit painful. I took me almost four days to figure out how to launch Hunchentoot as a daemon at startup under FreeBSD (http://github.com/l0stman/Hunchentoot-daemon). In my case, the lisp server itself lays behind nginx as a proxy. The latter serves the static pages too. Here's nginx's configuration:

     server {
        listen       80;
        server_name  localhost;

        location / {
            root   /usr/local/www/nginx;
            # Use absract URL for static pages
            try_files $uri.html $uri/index.html $uri $uri.txt @fallback;
        }

        location @fallback {
            return 404;
        }

        # redirect server error pages to the static page /50x.html
        #
        error_page   500 502 503 504  /50x.html;
        location = /50x.html {
            root   /usr/local/www/nginx-dist;
        }

        # Tunnel all requests where the URI path begins with "/ht"
        # to a Hunchentoot server listening on 127.0.0.1:8080
        #
        location /ht/ {
            rewrite ^/ht/(.*)$ /$1 break;
            proxy_pass   http://127.0.0.1:8080;
            proxy_redirect http://127.0.0.1:8080 /ht;
            proxy_read_timeout 300;
        }
    }

Well...I haven't read the book, just skimmed through the chapters, but no, that looks more like a beginner book which focusses on the tools and the end goal rather than how to use the tools.

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