[racket] Isn't the web application tutorial too advanced?

Hi Ben,

Thank you for your feedback. The basic tutorial you're imagining is
basically contained within the beginning of the Continue. For
instance, the first section shows how to do request handling and
response sending (because a servlet is a function from request to
response.) Routing has its own tutorial:

http://docs.racket-lang.org/web-server/dispatch.html#%28part._.Using_web-server_dispatch%29

and then that's it. I can imagine writing a very short tutorial that
just concatenates these together, but I'm missing the value of doing
that. If I write something, would you be willing to check it out for
me?

Jay


On Mon, Apr 28, 2014 at 6:27 AM, Ben <yfefyf at gmail.com> wrote:
> After gaining some basic understanding of web applications, I wanted to
> develop one in Racket. So I went to the tutorial "Continue: Web Applications
> in Racket". When I reached "6 Advanced Control Flow", I saw
> `send/suspend/dispatch`. I didn't know what it is, so I clicked on the link
> to see its documentation and saw a very complex starting sentence:
>
>> Calls make-response with a function (often named embed/url) that, when
>> called with a procedure from `request?` to any/c will generate a URL, that
>> when invoked will call the function with the `request?` object and return
>> the result to the caller of send/suspend/dispatch.
>
> I couldn't figure out the meaning of this sentence, so I went on to
> `send/suspend`:
>
>> Captures the current continuation, stores it with exp as the expiration
>> handler, and binds it to a URL.
>
> Although I knew what a continuation is, I didn't know what it is in this
> context.
>
> Then I gave up.
>
> I know that the web framework for Racket is very advanced. But IMHO, for the
> tutorial, a simpler one with some basic functionality like request handling,
> response sending and routing will be enough. And an advanced one would
> probably scare beginners like me away.
>
> Hope my experience is somewhat useful to you.
>
> Thanks,
> Ben
>
>
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-- 
Jay McCarthy <jay at cs.byu.edu>
Assistant Professor / Brigham Young University
http://faculty.cs.byu.edu/~jay

"The glory of God is Intelligence" - D&C 93