Why isn’t Lisp 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.

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

You’re about to give 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 to web programming 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 the Racket’s built-in HTTP server.

We will tackle the battery of problems faced by web developers who want to hack the web in Racket. You’ll find out how to solve problems that the official Racket documentation doesn’t talk about. (Not in detail, anyway, and not in any full-length tutorial way).

In 184 pages, 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.

  1. The servlet: In the beginning there was request? → response?
  2. Routes: URL-based dispatching
  3. Logging
  4. Working with JSON data
  5. HTML templates
  6. Processing HTML forms
  7. Handling AJAX requests
  8. Cookies
  9. Testing

Part 2: Interacting with other 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.

  1. Using a relational database (db, sql)
  2. Session management (redis)
  3. Environment variables (dotenv)
  4. JSON Schema validation (argo)
  5. Models (ORM) (racquel)
  6. Sending HTTP requests (http)
  7. Caching (memcached)
  8. Database migrations with Phinx
  9. Racket & Docker
  10. A CRUD-style HTTP API
  11. Deploying a Racket-powered site behind a proxy

The ebook is in PDF format, with Racket starter code—fully-functioning mini-sites—illustrating how these topics can be tackled with Racket, for nearly every chapter.

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.

Get your copy

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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 sometimes by night, too.) I write about these topics over at lisp.sh. I made the Argo, a JSON Schema validator, as well as json-pointer (RFC 6901), uri-template (RFC 6570). I’m a co-author of the entry on the lambda calculus over at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I’ve worked as a researcher in mathematics and computer science, primarily in automated theorem proving.

In my view, Racket has a lot of potential for shaping how we develop for the web. The flexibility and power of Racket 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.