Foreword

As a general-purpose language, D has held good potential of being applied in the burgeoning web server domain. D's build speed makes its convenience close to that of scripting languages—the argument goes—and there's also a lot to like about the running speed of the resulting native code, too.

This has remained a theoretical possibility for a good while, until vibe.d came out of nowhere to take the D community by storm. The vibe.d framework is everything that I'd hoped it to be—a comprehensive, compelling, modern framework that wonderfully uses D's features to strike a balance between flexibility, performance, and ease of use.

It is everything I hoped... except for one thing. It doesn't have a good book teaching it properly. Therefore, it's easy to imagine my giddiness now that I was offered the honor to write this foreword for such a book.

Written by Kai Nacke, a long-standing and respected luminary of the D community (known among other things for LDC, the LLVM-based D compiler), D Web Development does an admirable job of taking its reader from not knowing much about web development (as I confess your truly is, or at least was) to getting a high-performance server up and running. Also, customizing it in so many ways: content, localization, data connectivity, interoperation, and defining extensions.

Since its creation, vibe.d has slowly but surely become one of the most important frameworks written in D and simultaneously one of the best examples of using D on large scale, so much so that vibe.d is being made part of the reference D distribution. This book is a necessary and welcome term of that equation.

Andrei Alexandrescu

Co-developer of the D programming language