I think most people mean something more like Uncommonweb or KPAX. I built a fairly sophisticated application for a client using TBNL (now Hunchentoot), CL-WHO and CLSQL.

Building a web application doesn't require a framework; it does require a set of libraries to handle talking over http, generating HTML and often talking to a database. Since most frameworks include these, some people may confuse the two. A framework is really just a half-done bottom-up application, which is pretty useful when it matches the kind of application you're building and pretty useless otherwise.