Working with http requests and xml in common lisp

I'm le开发者_StackOverflow社区arning common lisp at the moment and would now like to do my first steps working with "real" data. I would like to retrieve some xml via http and process that data. Searching the web, I was not able to find a simple "default" way of working with http and xml in lisp!? As lisp is said to be used for commercial applications too, I wonder if everybody is writing their own http clients and xml parsers!?

Could some lisp guru give me some starting points about how to connect lisp to the web, i.e. doing http requests and working with xml?

---

I think the most popular http client library for Common Lisp is DRAKMA, and the most popular XML parser is CXML.