lfest: A Routing Party for LFE Web Apps

The Clojure community (in particular, James Reeves) has produced one of the best APIs I've seen for creating RESTful services, or any application using path dispatching (routing), really: Compojure.

I've been really missing this in LFE. Despite the fact that creating RESTful apps in LFE with YAWS is so simple it doesn't even need a framework, the routes can be a bit difficult to read, due to some of the destructuring that's done (e.g., URL paths).

Take the following route declaration from the yaws-rest-starter project:

Note that this example delegates additional routing to other functions, since all the routing in one function was pretty difficult to read. This, however, detracts from the overall readability in a different way: there's not one place to look to see what functions map to the complete URL-space for this service.

I wanted to be able to do something like what you can do in Clojure:

LFE is a Lisp with macros, so why not? Also, nox or mheise (I forget who) on the #erlang-lisp channel had previously noted all the lfe* projects (and these too), and suggested that someone create the inevitable "lfest" repo on Github.

Enter lfest. After a weekend of hacking and debugging some tiny macros, surprisingly little code now supports routes definitions like the following in LFE+YAWS web apps:

If you're curious to see what this actually expands to before getting compiled in a .beam file, you can view it here.

Bonus for LFE webdevs: this project also has a module of HTTP status codes, for easy re-use in other projects.

The recent work I've been doing with macros has really helped shape the section I've been planning to write in the LFE User Guide. I haven't wanted it to be yet another dry description of macros in a Lisp-2. Instead, my hope is to help jump-start people into how to think about macros, how to start writing them immediately (without years of study first), and how to debug them.

The trick, as with all complicated subjects, is how to remove the barrier to entry and get folks that necessary hands-on experience without dumbing-down the material. It's almost ready...

Also, it's Bay to Breakers today, and Ocean Beach is bumpin. The synchronicity is just eery. May you party just as hard with routes in LFE.