Selected tech. stack for web application - criticism / comments?

Question

I'm about to build my first serious Lisp-based project: a web application that will need to scale to tens of thousands of users (not concurrently - probably hundreds, at most, concurrently).

The stack I'm intending to use looks like:

• Weblocks web framework with a BerkeleyDB back-end
• Elephant object database
• Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL)
• Ubuntu Server (10.04 LTS)

I have two areas of concern re. this stack:

• Is Elephant dead? The latest release is getting on for three years old ... which could just mean that it's stable I guess :-)

• As a relative newcomer to Lisp (but with significant RoR & ASP.NET experience) are any of those technologies likely to melt my head?

Feedback on my choices, & suggestions of alternatives, would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Elephant is effectively unmaintained. It does not work on current SBCL and the patch to fix the issue has not been applied. It's possible that someone else might pick up the development but it's not clear in the short term if that will happen. Some people use Rucksack as an object store, and bknr-datastore is also interesting.

Ubuntu is fine, but don't use Ubuntu Lisp packages; it's better to get SBCL from www.sbcl.org and libraries via Quicklisp. Because of that, almost any Linux will work equally well. I use Debian for my Lisp-powered website.