[Openmcl-devel] Deploying CCL on a production server

[Ron Garret]

I'm getting close to deploying CCL on a production server, which has forced me to reluctantly reach the following conclusion: the fact that Lisp allows code to be changed dynamically means that unless you are extremely disciplined about how you patch the code in your server, it is not at all difficult to end up in a situation where the server needs to be restarted.  When that happens, it would be nice not to have the server machine go completely dead, but instead to respond with a nice "Server temporarily unavailable" page, and maybe even continue to serve static content.  So much as I'm a fan of Lisp and Hunchentoot, it seems to me that it's not a good idea to use that combination as the front-end of a production application, but instead to deploy the Lisp app as a FastCGI or the back-end of a proxy server setup.

If anyone disagrees with this analysis or has a better idea of how to deploy a Lisp app onto a production server I would love to hear it.

Thanks,
rg