[plt-scheme] another application for plt scheme + database question

I just wrote someone some notes on my current project, and figured I
might as well forward a copy here (below), as one more example of PLT
Scheme being used.  Once the core libraries are written, I think Scheme
will afford a tactical advantage over more popular languages for this
application.

Also, a question... Can someone familiar with all of "spgsql",
SrPersist, and SchemeQL comment on their relative apropriateness for my
application?  I'm initially using Ryan Culpepper's "spqsql" for
connectivity to PostgreSQL.  I'm planning to store many large blobs and
also map some potentially hairy metadata object graphs onto the
relational tables.  I don't require backend support for anything other
than PostgreSQL (the potential to retarget to Oracle would be nice, but
not a requirement).  I'd rather avoid an ODBC layer unless it gave me
big feature wins.


> Just FYI, I've been bumping into the ephemerality of online news reports
> a lot lately, and have started building specialized Web-crawler tools
> (in Scheme) to try to capture the reports as they are made, for
> real-time and post analysis.
> 
> If you happen to hear of other people working on this, I'd be curious.
> Perhaps there's some potential collaboration, especially on the grunt work.
> 
> A few notes below...
> 
> 
> Most of the initial work for me is in quickly beefing up the Scheme
> library support base with general-purpose tools that are already
> available for some other languages (although hopefully the Scheme tools
> are more robust and flexible than the ones I've seen for Perl, Java,
> Python, etc.):
> 
>     http://www.neilvandyke.org/htmlprag/htmlprag.pdf
>     http://www.neilvandyke.org/uriframe/uriframe.pdf
> 
> I've also been working on database issues, and may need to write a
> better-suited HTTP client library than the one I'm currently using.
> These tools will be released if and as I build them.
> 
> I also have some research ideas (software agents and news analysis) that
> require these tools.  Some of the ideas could be prototyped and
> evaluated in news analysis workstation tools that might also be useful
> to journalists, watchdog groups, policy-makers, and perhaps even large
> numbers of private citizens.
> 
> In the interim, I occasionally capture ephemeral news reports in my
> weblog, so that they're preserved *somewhere*.  Small example posted
> yesterday:  http://www.neilvandyke.org/weblog/cnn-war-start.png

-- 
                                             http://www.neilvandyke.org/