Server: Racket—Practical Web Development with the Racket HTTP Server

“If Racket is so great, why isn't it more widely used in web development?”

You’d love to make a site in Racket, the hottest Lisp out there. The Racket developers have built up a truly impressive system that’s a real pleasure to use.

All the ingredients appear to be there:

Built in web-server? Check.

High-quality, thorough documentation? Check and check.

A Lisp that feels like it comes from the future? Oh yeah.

But there’s precious little guidance out there on how to make real-world web sites with the Racket web server.

Sure, the official documentation contains a handful of simple examples. They’re a good start. But you’re not sure how to move from them to making a more complex site. There’s a big gap.

Maybe you start to suspect that Racket’s HTTP server is just a fancy toy.

Maybe you’ve even given up on the idea of hacking the web in Lisp.

That would be a real shame, because the Racket web server—while fairly lean compared with other web frameworks out there—is powerful and flexible.

And when you combine Racket’s HTTP server with the cutting-edge features of Racket, we’re talking about a system that web developers can drool over.

Even if you’re new to the web, Racket’s direct approach gives you a delightful way to dip your toes in without getting bogged down in a bazillion different frameworks and dependencies.

Enter Server: Racket

Server: Racket is an ebook all about real-world web development with Racket. In this ebook, you will learn how to make real-world web sites using the built-in Racket HTTP server.

We will build up a full-fledged site, step-by-step, and find out how to solve problems that the official documentation doesn’t talk about (not in detail, anyway, and not in any full-length tutorial).

We’ll dig in to these web development topics and see how to deal with them in Racket.

Part 1: HTTP à la Racket

Working with HTTP requests and responses entirely within Racket: no external systems, and using only modules that come standard with Racket.

• The servlet: In the beginning there was request? → response?
• Routes: URL-based dispatching
• Error handling
• Logging
  
• Working with JSON data
  
• HTML templates
  
• Processing HTML forms
  
• Handling AJAX requests
  
• Cookies
  
• Testing

Part 2: Connecting with external systems

Where we begin to connect to specialized systems running outside of Racket and use specialized packages that aren't included in a standard Racket installation.

• Using a relational database (db, sql)
  
• Session management (redis)
  
• Environment variables (dotenv)
  
• JSON Schema validation (argo)
  
• Models (object-relational mapping) (racquel)
  
• Sending HTTP requests (http)
  
• Caching with memcached (memcached)
  
• Database migrations with Phinx
  
• Racket and Docker
  
• A CRUD-style HTTP API
  
• Deploying a Racket site behind a proxy server

What's included

The ebook is a 184-page PDF, together with Racket starter code to help jump-start your Racket web adventures.

What others are saying

Server: Racket was essential reading as I built my first e-commerce site from scratch with Racket. It’s a terrific, practical book with lots of useful ideas and examples.

— Matthew Butterick, creator of Pollen and author of Beautiful Racket, Practical Typography, and Typography for Lawyers, talking about his Racket-powered site mbtype.com.

About the author

I’m Jesse Alama. I’ve been hacking Scheme and Lisp since 1996. And I love building web sites. I’m a full-stack developer by day. And by night, too. I write about these topics over at lisp.sh. I made the Argo  (JSON Schema validator), json-pointer (a notation for referring to JSON data), and uri-template (RFC 6570) Racket packages. I'm the author of the entry on the lambda calculus in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and have worked as a researcher in mathematics and computer science, primarily in automated theorem proving.

In my view, Lisp has a lot of potential for shaping how we develop for the web. The flexibility and power of Lisp is well-suited to taking on the web’s thorny problems.

I’m happy to share with you what I’ve learned so far about making web sites using Racket, a truly world-class Lisp.