Hi,

I haven't done any heavy lifting in Schme but have written a lot software in Rebol, a proprietary languag e that (at least to me) is in the same family. Just to be sure: the family thing is not what I want to discuss.

I have written quite a few web applications and like Scheme, had to built most of it from the ground up. I doing so I noticed that the framework isn't important; the "intrinsic" power of the language is, provided that there are some common libraries. The most powerful languages seem (in general) Rebol, Lisp, Scheme. But again that's not my point.

Provided you'd want to write web applications you need the following functionality at least:

- a dynamic include (module) system

- a templating engine (e.g. the <% %> tags in html edited pages)

- A FastCGI interface with all CGI processing capabilities one would expect (FastCGI is pretty good supported the last two years; it took some time but finally it is something you can actually use)

- Basic encryption to protect consumer data: RSA, DH and AES as well as SHA1 or better

- database interfaces to mysql and optionally postgresql

- some XML (de-)serialization mechanism, though I personally try to avoid XML whenever possible

Then your average webapp is just a FastCGI process with a database connection that can process templated pages or other CGI requests (hello REST) smartly and generate secure sessions. If the language that runs all this is symbolic the data manipulation part becomes easier and that's where the real gain will be.

Now the question is: if you look at the above list, what's there and what's not? I'd be willing put some time in the remaining (to b written) components for Gambit-C. And if possible even in a portable way.

Just my 2 eurocents....

--Maarten