[racket] Servlets and forms

Hey,

On Sun, Oct 10, 2010 at 1:12 AM, Jay McCarthy <jay.mccarthy at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 12:35 PM, Markku Rontu <markku.rontu at iki.fi> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I've been experimenting with the web servlets lately and I'm not sure how
> I
> > should be handling forms. The documentation guides me to use formlets
> > instead of bindings but the library seems rather incomplete. I mean based
> on
> > the source it seems to be missing radio buttons and files, for example.
> Also
>
> The next release has support for almost all the form elements:
>
>
> http://github.com/plt/racket/blob/master/collects/web-server/formlets/input.rkt
>

Good to know.


> > the documentation seems to refer mostly to an older version with
> > input-string etc. Using bindings is not a problem itself, it's what I'm
> used
> > to in Java-land but then again I have to build a complete framework on
> top
> > of it to handle everything properly.
>
> I suspect most people using bindings directly.
>


> >
> > I managed to get simple formlets working as well as the direct bindings
> but
> > where am I supposed to do validation? Guess I do need to build the
> framework
> > myself?
>
> I'm not sure I understand the question. If your application has
> special requirements on input, then you'll need to check it. Probably
> on the request handler for the form action.
>

Well I was looking for a framework or an existing practice of doing it
right. Typical web frameworks have some XML-based DSL or whatnot for
validating expressions. I was wondering if there was any neat solutions for
Racket yet. There is a lot of grunt work regarding showing validation
errors, directing back or forward, validating common things such as dates
etc. that I think should have some support. How? I'm not completely happy
with the solutions I've seen so far...

> If somebody has some useful pointers or best practices, I'd appreciate it.
> > Or is there some framework I'm missing? What's in it for the formlets in
> the
> > future? Where is the active development now?
>
> I'm interested in hearing what is missing from the formlets library.
> I'm also interested in a reusable validation layer, but I haven't come
> up with a good design yet, so there's nothing in the distribution.
>

I can only think of in terms of existing Java-frameworks but I dislike them
anyway. I'll try to think of something different next so I'll get back with
some ideas a bit later. My approach is anyway to change quite much how
typical UI code is written so have to think the fundamentals a bit more to
have some good first idea.

-Markku
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