If you are interested in a book on Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) I’d appreciate it if you could fill out this survey. Thanks!
If you are interested in a book on Racket (formerly PLT Scheme) I’d appreciate it if you could fill out this survey. Thanks!
Acceptance testing is a must for any developer of complex web applications. Selenium is a suite of tools to help automate acceptance by recording user actions, turning them into code, and playing them back in a remote controlled web browser.
Now, thanks to a lazy Saturday afternoon and a rather nice bottle of ginger beer, the joys of Selenium are available to the Racketcommunity by way of our new Selenium PLT library. Check it out on our Github page and let us know how you get on!
Those of you familiar with our open source libraries may know aboutDelirium, our re-implementation of Selenium using the Racket HTTP Server. Delirium was a great project that made for an elegant demonstration of the power of continuations in web development.
You may fairly ask the question: why, if Delirium is so good, are we releasing bindings for Selenium? There are several answers to this. The main reason is time: maintaining compatibility across all the major browsers is a difficult process, and that’s time we could be devoting to our other pet projects. Second, we’re doing a lot of web development in other languages these days; for example, we’re currently working on a project using Scala and Lift. There are already bindings for Selenium in most of these languages, and it makes sense to use the same tools across the board.
Current Delirium users shouldn’t worry – we will continue to develop all of our libraries to maintain compatibility with new versions of Racket. Our plans internally are to switch to Selenium for new projects, and to keep using Delirium for our existing code. If the time does come to switch away from Delirium, you should find translation to our Selenium bindings to be quite straightforward.
PLT Scheme 4.0 is out. We’ve been using the pre-releases for months so this release isn’t particularly significant to us. However, for Universities and other institutions having an official release is important. I do think that too many individual developers stick with out-dated versions of PLT Scheme. The number of questions about 372, which is at least a year old, amazes me. Pre-releases are so much better! Go upgrade!
Many years ago I started the Scheme UK user group in merrye London Towne, and all was good. Then I moved to Birmingham and Scheme UK slowly died. I always had the intention I’d start it up again when I had more time, but now I don’t have to! Ewan Higgs has taken the initiative and organised the next meeting for the 28th of May. Dave Griffiths will be talking about his fairly awesome fluxus system. All the details are on the Scheme UK site.
Dave and I, representing Untyped, will be at the Scheme Workshop,ICFP, and CUFP in Freiburg. If you’re there, do say Hi!
We’re pleased to announce the release of Unlib, a library of utility functions. Like most PLT Scheme libraries it is available from PLaneT. You can also track development via our Subversion server. For now the URL is https://ssl.untyped.com/svn/repos/untyped.com/unlib/ so you can checkout the code like this:
svn checkout https://ssl.untyped.com/svn/repos/untyped.com/unlib/trunk unlib
It’s mostly Dave G’s work, so congratulations to Dave! (And extra congratulation to Dave G who graduated yesterday with a PhD in Computer Science!!)