[racket] What about an Racket Artifacts thread?

From: Galler (lzgaller at optonline.net)
Date: Tue Apr 24 19:17:48 EDT 2012

Eli, Neil

This thread raises an interesting point.

An Artifact is herein defined as some piece of Racket code that does a useful
piece of work.

Some of the lesser lights in the community, (such as myself) will, over the
course of a working day, come up with a useful Artifact or two. 

Three concrete examples for me today

#1) interacting with the openSSL executable
#2) specifying a HMAC-SHA1 stuffer for the stateless web-server 
#3) random n-byte key generator

For (#2), While the documentation is absolutely correct, figuring out the
correct invocation could take the next user a few hours. See below:

#:stuffer (stuffer-chain serialize-stuffer (stuffer-compose base64-stuffer
(HMAC-SHA1-stuffer #"mysupersecretkey"))) 

I also have interesting Artifacts on interacting with MS-SQL, javascript, AJAX,
Android etc. 

Stuff that is both:

A) not worthy of publishing a PLaneT library, 
B) of zero academic interest

but should be shared with the community to further more non-academic use.

My Suggestion:

Is there room, either on the blog, or in the user group, for a Racket Artifacts
thread

i.e.
subj: How to call openSSL
subj: How to build a MAC for a stateless URI
subj: How to build a key generator
subj: How to clean up state and ignore thrown errors [this issue has come up in
a number of threads now]
etc....

More experienced developers could comment on the initial solution as required.

Maybe we can just agree to a subject-line convention in the usergroup
 i.e. subj:HOW TO <do something>

Thoughts solicited. Is this a waste of usergroup time and bandwidth?

R/
Zack



Posted on the users mailing list.