Hi all, TL;DR: What are some patterns/approaches for web sites for which Racket is particularly suited *and* for which you can point at decently written up examples in Racket or other languages that share such features?
Much longer me: I spent much of summer implementing online web sites with quite a bit of state (do step 1; if answer a do step 2, if answer b do step 3; keep forking, randomize some things in between). The first website I did in Django, because 2 years ago when I rolled my own in Racket, I ended up with an unmaintainable mess of code that had sql and sexpr sprinkled across all types of files, and I didn't dare touch anything anymore. Now I learned that I am perfectly capable of writing an unmaintainable mess of code in Python too. Hence the second such web site (all are used for economic experiments, think surveys with a lot of randomization and if/then logic) is again back to Racket. The thing is that, while I know about MVC and grok it better after having spent time with Django, I am often at a loss to figure out where to draw boundaries in Racket. This is true for Django too, but there are so many examples out there, that it is easier to figure out what belongs where, and Django forces you to put some things in the models (more or less) and others in the views. And all the standard stuff - forms, simple SQL - has obvious ways of doing it. There are some things I dislike about it, but these are some positives. Now that I am back in Racket land, and at least partially get what continuations do (thanks to primarily Philip, George, Jesse, Bogdan and Matthew B's writings and answers on this list over the years), my code is vastly better than 2 years ago. Yet, I still feel that it is pretty bad, and I see loads of duplications that I do, sometimes due to lack of time to refactor, but just as often because I have no clue how to refactor it in a way that will not make it ridiculously fine-tuned to my current purpose. So, my question is this: what approches (if you like big ponderous words, what paradigms) and patterns are there to write web sites, and are you aware of examples that highlight them *concretely* in code in a way that the send/suspend/dispatch is described in the "Continue: ..." tutorial? Here are approaches that I know of: - MVC: Django and Rails for instance, easy to find examples. Usually object oriented it seems, but it's sort of what I do in Racket as well. - Single-Page Apps: I never implemented one, but my sense was that you can do MVC with it too, and it's more about whether you use JS to do things asynchronously. I may be wrong and there might be more to it. - Continuation style: What "Continue" does, and again it's not really an alternative to MVC, but more how you implement it (or other things). I still struggle a lot with doing this well, as there are few descriptions of it that go beyond "Continue". When I google, it brings up essentially the Racket crowd and something called Seaside (I had never heard of it) - Microservices (I do not get what it is, if it even is one thing) So what are examples in Racket or Racket-like languages (semantics, not syntax, so it doesn't have to look Lispy if it is functional or uses continuations or whatever features of Racket) that I could use to guide how I *could* structure my web site in a given way? Django isn't that great a fit since it has a pretty heavy ORM, and does lots of magic behind the scenes on objects, which is not trivial to map to the functional style of Racket. I don't know whether these are related to it, but half (all?) of my struggles come from trying to manage the state people are in and ending up passing around biggish objects, or adding 2 or more boolean fields per page to the database and calling the database on every new page. I understand that this is not the most well-formed question on this email list and it's likely I am asking the wrong question, so I am very open to being told "What you should be asking is ... " (such as, this is not about web stuff, but ...). Cheers, Marc -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/3375bd01-2fe5-4c9a-b926-d8b272010b74%40googlegroups.com.
