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I wonder if some functional languages are used for web development and which are most useful and supported with that goal?

Rainer Joswig
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Alexander Ivanov
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    Neither Common Lisp nor Scheme are functional languages. Try one of the many Erlang/Haskell web frameworks. – Vijay Mathew Sep 16 '10 at 03:39
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    @Vijay Mathew: The Lisps are functional. While they technically multi-paradigm, they definitely allow a programmer to be purely functional if he so wishes. – Greg Sep 17 '10 at 00:10
  • @Greg so does C. (think function pointers :-)) – Vijay Mathew Sep 17 '10 at 04:29
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    @Vijay Mathew: I suppose my counter in this argument would be http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2539#comment-38348 but I suspect that you realize that. Within the context of this question though, I'd still argue that Scheme and Common Lisp can be considered functional programming languages, which I probably wouldn't say of C. – Greg Sep 17 '10 at 11:04
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    Oh wow, return of the "Foo isn't functional" argument: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3527753/. Count me out of this argument! – Frank Shearar Sep 20 '10 at 08:11
  • Agreed with Frank. Vijay, Greg, please take this argument to the Smalltalk threads. ;-) – Owen S. Sep 26 '10 at 21:52

6 Answers6

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PLT Racket has a web server- it's an up-to-date, actively developed Scheme offshoot, and may be something that you want to look into. Here's some documentation:

http://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server-internal/index.html

There are a few StackOverflow threads that can provide some more answers to this:

state of web development using functional programming language

What are the popular 'web-ready' functional programming languages?

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Greg
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Clojure (and Scala not really a lisp) are also used for server side web development.

esamatti
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It's safe to say there's a fair bit of server side stuff going on for Common Lisp!

Update: In my newsfeed this evening, compliments of Xach: A Common Lisp Web Development Primer, Part 1

Frank Shearar
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Clojure is a very promising choice for server-side web development.

Key advantages:

  • It's a Lisp (see Paul Graham's "beating the averages" essay on why this is important)
  • You get access to the full Java ecosystem of libraries - this is a huge advantage for server-side development (since the Java library ecosystem is second to none)
  • It offers high performance - always compiled, takes full advantage of the JVM for optimisations etc. On the benchmarks game it is the second fastest dynamically typed language (after Common Lisp)
  • You can use ClojureScript (basically Clojure that compiles to JavaScript) on the client side for and end-to-end client server solution.

Currently the leading Clojure web framework is probably Noir (http://webnoir.org/) but there are various others starting to emerge.

igouy
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mikera
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Erlang is a functional language used (among other many things) for server side web development, e.g.

As for Common Lisp frameworks, see Best web framework in Common-lisp?

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miku
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Hunchentoot is a nice webserver for CL. CL-WHO is an HTML generation library, and there is a mod_lisp for apache I think too. You can set up something with cl-fcgi, and have a server connect to it, like a CL-WHO + cl-fcgi setup, or cl-who + hunchentoot, or cl-who + mod_lisp. I'ts your choice.

Alex
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