[racket] Racket in the large

Thanks for the summary, this helps us fill in some of the gaps of what 
was said before.

gonzalo diethelm wrote at 08/20/2011 11:15 PM:
> 5. There might be a Racket software engineering book soon, planned by Neil Van Dyke. I declare myself as a sure customer.
>   

Besides my vaporware book, there are several already existing books for 
Racket, included in electronic form for free with Racket.  Plus there 
are the related books HtDP and PLAI by the same people.  And I have 
heard of two other tentative new Racket books in the works other than my 
own.

> 6. I think there is one thing missing in Racket, and this was also pointed out during the discussion: database drivers for major DBMSs (I would say at least Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server on the commercial front, and PostgreSQL, SQLite and MySQL on the open source front). In addition to that, I think Racket would be greatly enhanced by a single relational data access layer that would hide the differences between specific RDBMSs and facilitate switching from one to another. (Note: I am not trying to dictate anything about Racket, just voicing my opinion).
>   

Looks like this question didn't get answered before.

Three generalized interfaces that support multiple RDBMS backends:

http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=db.plt&owner=ryanc
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=dbi.plt&owner=bzlib
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=sqlid.plt&owner=oesterholt

There's also these (plus some unreleased ones):

http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=snooze.plt&owner=untyped
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=spgsql.plt&owner=schematics
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=mysql.plt&owner=jaz
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=mongodb.plt&owner=jaymccarthy
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=mongodb-native.plt&owner=dabag
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=sqlid-helper.plt&owner=sweeney
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=sql-table.plt&owner=dfisher
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=libpq.plt&owner=synx
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=sqlite.plt&owner=jaymccarthy
http://planet.racket-lang.org/display.ss?package=sql-oo.plt&owner=jaymccarthy

Regarding Oracle and DB2, I suspect that anyone invested in one of those 
could use some of the open source Racket interfaces for other RDBMSs as 
examples for supporting another RDBMS.  The cost might be relatively 
minor (considering the large existing investment in the RDBMS).

> My conclusion is that I will keep learning and using Racket for my future projects;

Glad to hear it.

There is a lot of smart activity to going on with Racket, which is not 
always well-advertised, so asking questions on the email list is often 
helpful.

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