Introduction to Web Development in Racket

Racket is a Lisp that strives not only to be a best-in-breed environment for language-oriented programming; it’s also a great language for doing systems programming. In particular, Racket comes out-of-the-box with an HTTP server and a potpourri of libraries and DSLs for web development. For some time now, pretty much every language has had such feature, so what makes Racket different and worth consideration? A killer feature that distinguishes Racket from other frameworks and languages it is support for continuations and their clever use to make a full-fledged language for web programming, which help make REST and allied concepts such as HATEOAS automatic. The aim of this tutorial is to give the audience an impression of what web programming in Racket looks like by building a little HTTP API. A Racket package will be made available with which you can hack along with the teacher as we proceed through the tutorial.

Jesse Alama

I’m a fullstack developer at Vicampo.de GmbH, an online wine retailer based in Mainz, Germany. But my heart is in the Lisp world, primarily Racket. In my private life, I hack the web with Racket and have authored a moderately successful book on the subject, Server: Racket, and am working on an upcoming course on introductory web programming using Racket.

Prerequisites

Participants will need a text editor of their choice, as well as Racket on their machines. It can be downloaded at

https://download.racket-lang.org

Alternatively, Racket is likely to be available using various package manages for many OSs and distributions (Homebrew for macOS, all sorts of Linux distributions, *BSD, etc.). After installing, this command line command

$ racket --version

should work, as well as

$ raco