Basic Project

We are going to assume that your first project is a small standalone program using one of the common libraries for Common Lisp. Since Common Lisp is a general purpose high-level programming language, it can handle any common high-level language task.

Common libraries are installed using Quicklisp!

Go over there and install it, then come back to this tutorial.

Let’s assume for the purpose of the starting project that you want to recursively walk a web server and take some action based upon the internal contents. We’ve supplied a minimal (not very robust or general) solution in web-trotter.lisp, available from our site.

Without examining the details of the Trotter, notice that there’s a line:

(ql:quickload '(:drakma :split-sequence :cl-ppcre :babel))

This tells Quicklisp to ensure that the libraries DRAKMA, SPLIT-SEQUENCE, CL-PPCRE, and BABEL are loaded.

In your favorite IDE, load up web-trotter.lisp and execute (run-trotter). It’ll wander around the CLIKI for a bit printing out the names of URLS it could visit.

The Trotter is a basic web crawler; some further work could produce a tool that would feed in the data to a database for searching.

Note that there is a lack of a main function. Lisp has no specified MAIN, unlike Java or C.

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