had contributions sitting around for a while because we did not have the capacity to review and moderate these additions, and
felt we do not have a good enough understanding of the ecosystem in general to assess whether the chosen libraries are reasonable, or whether there’s other options that need to be mentioned.
To make the cookbook really useful, we need to build a better process around maintaining it and adding to it.
I propose:
We appoint a handful of moderators / maintainers for the OCaml Cookbook, drawing from volunteers.
I create a Telegram group to stay in contact with you all to ask for help on cookbook PRs. (This could a group focused precisely on the OCaml Cookbook.)
So, if you’re up for helping with the cookbook, have any questions, or other remarks, please reach out to sabine@tarides.com, or reply here!
Perhaps a “generic Database” section would be interesting. I mean, the caqti library used by my submission can be used with Postgres and MySQL.
I am not that convinced by “Full text search”. But it can be easy to propose something (it is just a SELECT query as already demonstrated… We just have a : column LIKE “%text%” filter), that would just demonstrates a SQL feature.
It’s perfectly reasonable to make an #ocaml-cookbook channel on the OCaml Discord, but I won’t reliably get notifications to address questions in a timely manner. (For some reason, Discord is very bad with channel-specific notifications on my Android phone.)
Which reminds me, the #ocaml.org channel on the OCaml Discord could also be used, as it’s a part of OCaml.org.
I think you’re on to something. The SQL-database-specific full text search tasks probably aren’t that interesting because there’s nothing special about them when you know how to make SQL queries (which the other tasks show). They could be replaced by some more practical-minded and diverse tasks.
For example, we could have full-text-search-related tasks
that showcase libraries that integrate with search engines and cloud offerings such as Elasticsearch, Typesense, Solr, Manticore Search, Algolia, etc., or
examples how to achieve full text search with OCaml in a browser-context (e.g. Melange + integrating a JavaScript library, or using some OCaml library compiled to JavaScript).
I think bridges/bots exist relaying messages between different chat applications. I don’t know of a better solution that would make everyone happy, but I also don’t have any experience setting one up, so just putting the suggestion out there.
They could be replaced by some more practical-minded and diverse tasks.