Franz Tech Corner News: ACL 7.0 Preview, New multiprocessing
implementation

The Franz Tech Corner, September 9, 2004

1. The new multiprocessing implementation in Allegro CL 7.0

This is a preview of one of the new features of ACL Version 7.0,
shipping soon to supported customers.

In the new implementation, processes within Lisp are instances of a
CLOS class that can be specialized to get customized behavior. Process
objects mediate the programmer's access to threads. The programmer
creates an instance of the process class (or of a subclass of the
process class) in order to start a parallel computation. The
computation's state can be inspected and modified through the use of
functions that receive the process object as an argument.

Because processes are CLOS instances, the programmer can create
specialized process classes whose instances contain
application-specific attributes or behaviors. A server application,
for example, could add slots to hold request queues or sockets or
transaction-status data structures. After methods defined on
initialize-instance and process-terminate could perform
application-specific startup and shutdown actions.

This new model allows greatly simplified system design and
implementation. It allows the programmer to treat the process and the
server instance as a single object, instead of forcing a program
structure in which they are two distinct things, one of which owns the
other.

For further details:
http://franz.com/support/tech_corner/index.lhtml#newmp-090504

2. Web Seminar - September 15th at 10:00 am Pacific time:

"Lisp and SOA Web Services for Today's Complex Problems"

For details:
franz.com/services/conferences_seminars/power_programming.lhtml

Space is limited, so please R.S.V.P. to info@franz.com as soon as possible.

3. Success Story - BioLingua

BioLingua is a novel concept in client-server programmability for
computational biology and bioinformatics. Lisp is the most natural
programming language in which to implement the symbolic computations
that are crucial to modern systems biology. Lisp's ability to
manipulate code as data made the unique properties of BioLingua very
easy to implement. The ACL compiler and garbage collector are probably
the best of any Lisp implementation; ACL code compares favorably
against nearly every other non-C language, and often 10 times faster
than the next nearest competitor. Franz has done a superb job with
program-development tools, with packages to support important
machinery such as threads, database access, and web server
capabilities. BioLingua is in use in a number of laboratories around
the world. We strongly believe that the facilities that it offers in
support of important biological science would not have been possible
without a Lisp implementation of the quality of ACL.

We've been given permission to post the article until it appears
in Oxford's online journal, Bioinformatics in a few months, you can
view it here:

franz.com/success/customer_apps/bioinformatics/BioLingua.pdf

4. Lisp in the Press.

The October issue of Dr. Dobbs Journal includes an article titled
"HTML Templates For Lisp", written by Gene Michael Stover, starting on
page 36. It includes code listings and a link to programs that use the
library. The publication's web address is http://www.ddj.com/

5. Services

Allegro CL Certification Program - Basic and Intermediate courses
available. Next 3-day sessions:

- 9/15, 9/22, and 9/29
- 10/13, 10/20, and 10/27

http://franz.com/services/classes

Make the most of your Allegro CL application by utilizing our
consulting services,

http://franz.com/services/consulting/

For more information about other Franz products and services, please
contact your product application manager or email sales@franz.com.