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The state of OCaml documentation is not great... I have had such a pain finding documentation. Generally, the only source for it is the French university that created/promotes it [0]. But even their pages are often almost a decade old and I have frequently found errors in the documentation.

Overall, while OCaml is a truly beautiful language (and I do really enjoy writing in it[1]), it is really tough to get work done efficiently because so few resources seem to exist.

With that said, I discovered a mod_ocaml Apache module implementation[2] (that is really outdated and not very efficient) and moved it to github. (I am not the author, nor have I had time to work on it either.) But if there was any interest in reviving this, I'd certainly give it a go. This seems to be a potentially viable way to increase interest in server-side OCaml usage.

[0] http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/index.en.html

[1] https://github.com/eatonphil/owebl

[2] https://github.com/eatonphil/mod_ocaml

1 comments

> The state of OCaml documentation is not great... I have had such a pain finding documentation. Generally, the only source for it is the French university that created/promotes it.

That might have been true 5 years ago, but the OCaml Community site [0] is rather easy to find and links to many tutorials and books. Among these is the excellent Real World OCaml [1] book which is pretty great for experienced developers switching languages and available in print and freely online. Other resources for more beginning programmers exist as well. The INRIA resources are, indeed, rather poor and except fro the language reference, rather outdated.

Directly programming for Apache hasn't been popular for years now in any language I know (actually, only mod_php is popular, if at all, mod_python is completely dead and no idea about mod_perl). Usually languages have their own servers that get reverse-proxied by a frontend server like Apache or Nginx. And for this purpose Ocsigen [2] has been available (allowing an front-and-backend OCaml approach). If something simpler is desired, CoHTTP [3] exists, which is both a HTTP client and server. Reviving mod_ocaml is, in my opinion a waste of time and effort.

[0] http://ocaml.org/

[1] https://realworldocaml.org/

[2] http://ocsigen.org/

[3] https://github.com/mirage/ocaml-cohttp

Great points. I was being too vague. My biggest gripe was that I could only learn more of the syntax from the INRIA documentation. The books and OCaml websites definitely covered a lot of general programming recipes and more common paradigms. Ultimately since there were still so few examples I always ended up having to look at the actual language reference for useful information. As we're aware though, it is outdated. In particular, I found really getting a handle on object-oriented OCaml was tough. Probably just because other aspects of OCaml could be guessed/inferred from SML/*ML documentation.

My comments on mod_ocaml were also a little vague. When I began server-side programming I loved mod_php because of how simple it was. I only brought up mod_ocaml because (if it worked) it is probably the single easiest way to start writing ocaml web pages. Given, it is absolutely not performant whatsoever. I just kinda saw it as a gateway from hobbyist-level interest.

Thanks for all your resources though!