Geoffrey S. Knauth wrote at 05/14/2013 05:25 PM:
My question is, is there anyone else out there in Racket-land who has used AWS as part of the application? I'll be running on AWS hardware and some of the big files will have to be stored on S3.
Greg Hendershott developed an open source Racket interface to a bunch of AWS services: "http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=aws.plt&owner=gh";.
There is at least one (currently) closed source Racket S3 interface that predates the open source one, and I understand that one has been solid in production for large amounts of important data (using "curl" processes, to sometimes keep heavy file I/O from slowing down Racket server). So it's doable in theory.
I'm also probably going to make heavy use of JSON. The last time I did anything webby in Racket it was using XML, and JSON is dead simple by comparison. I just want reassurance that the Racket JSON support I found [3] is reasonably mature.
A tweaked version of Dave Herman's JSON library (which is an ancestor of the library in Racket) has been used successfully in production.
My "json-parsing" library hasn't yet been proven in production, as far as I know, but it's more flexible than the functionality in Racket, and I can fix bugs if they appear: http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket-json-parsing/
Another question of a web services nature: does Racket now handle web requests and responses that expect JSON fairly easily? I can't imagine the answer would be no, but I thought I would check.
You can do JSON the naive way with the Racket Web Server, "net/url", or the SCGI library, and it should work OK.
If you want to optimize for heavy use with the Racket Web Server, you might look at how request output is handled and whether you can speed things up by eliminating intermediate copying. (I did that for my "html-template" library work, but not for JSON yet.)
P.S. Total aside. I was typing "Racket-land" above and it made me think of the Elton John song Rocket Man [Elton John who very kindly played the piano for two hours at my friend's request at a restaurant in the late 1970s but that's another story]. I think there should be a Racket Man song.
A few of us started looking into the "Rocket Man" song (ad hoc citizens' subcommittee, operating in a purely advisory role): http://racket-lang.org/irc-logs/20121105.txt
Neil V. ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
