So what does a programmer do when he can't get the features he wants? Right, he codes it himself! I'll call it 'TweetSheet' for now. (it's not the best of names, but atleast it sounds better than TwitterSh.. well you know)
Learning a new language always comes with lots and lots of practice and this will be a good exercise for my Lisp skills. I've reached a point where I don't even think about using another language for coding anything. (Except work-related stuff, where C# is usually the choice I'm urged to make.)
It's going to be a TweetDeck-inspired web application featuring a columned view. For this I'll be using the awesome Hunchentoot webserver and a couple of other tools Edi Weitz wrote: Drakma and CL-WHO. For the JSON stuff there's cl-json.
Not long ago I was thinking of writing a blog post to complain about the bad state of the Common Lisp libraries. I was even tempted to ditch CL and try Clojure. (Because of the Java libs available.)
Assembling my toolkit for writing this Twitter app, I must say I'm quite impressed with the libraries I found. Weitz' stuff is very easy to use and a pleasure to work with since it's documented nicely. The cl-json lib doesn't work with SBCL 1.0.27 but a quick browsing through their mailing list shows that they're aware of the problem and it'll be fixed soon. So for now I stick to .24 of SBCL.
The basic Twitter search was up and running in no time. More time was spent getting the HTML and CSS right than writing the actual code to handle the json replies. While I'm praising Lisp tools, I'll add another one: wigflip.com by Zach Beane. The rounded corners I use for the tweet-boxes are made with the 'cornershop' part of the wigflip site. (thank you Zach!)
Here's a little preview of how it looks like now:
If this little project ever grows big enough to be meaningfull, I'll open up a Google Code page or something so people can help out. I'll be happy to share the source with anybody who asks, even if it was just to get some pointers on how to improve things.
I'm not giving up on Lisp. A language doesn't survive for 50 years if it sucks. I'm even starting to see now where other languages (like .NET) are getting their ideas from. Sure, the Lisp library collection is not like CPAN or Java, but the important ones are there, and I'm sure the ones that aren't there won't be hard to implement.
So yes, I'm sticking with Lisp!
4 comments:
Prolly meant CPAN not CSPAN. Nothing good comes out of CSPAN :-p
Yeah, I did mean CPAN. Fixing it now!
Did you ever get TweetDeck to work nicely? I got it to work in StumpWM but the notifications don't play nice. They always steal the focus :-(
I'm on 64bit, so AIR stuff is pretty hard. I've been using the tweet.im interface, since it integrates nicely with bitlbee.
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