On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Mats Rauhala wrote:

On 08:30 Fri 17 Jun     , Manfred Lotz wrote:

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Hi there, There are some web frameworks out there, as snap, yesod, happstack, and perhaps even more.

I'd like to get a recommendation which web framework might be easiest to get into, and to use for a haskell beginner.

My opinion is that you should go with Happstack. It doesn't hold your hand as Yesod does, and enables you to learn a bit at the same time.

But the real deal comes from the fact that Happstack is already mature, and has pretty good documentation. The Yesod people are doing a great job with their book, but as long as it's only half finished, it's a pain to learn Yesod. There seems to be no api docs whatsoever.

(Note: I'm the leader developer on Yesod.) I'd like to respectfully disagree with this assessment. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "mature", but Yesod has been developed actively for two years, has the vast majority of features you'll need on a project, is in use by many production settings and has the highest performance figures of any of the big three frameworks. As for documentation: the Yesod book as it stands is already pretty thorough. The entire basics section is complete, sans minor improvements that are constantly happening. Some of the more advanced features are not fully documented, but I'm not sure if you could say otherwise about Happstack (or Snap for that matter). And if by "API docs" you mean the Haddocks autogenerated on the Hackage server... unfortunately, that's a known issue with Hackage, outside of our control. But the sources themselves have Haddocks, and you can generate the documentation locally with some simple changes to your cabal config file. I'm not saying Happstack or Snap are bad frameworks, quite the opposite. But I don't think these generic "X isn't mature" or "Y has bad documentation" do much to help newcomers become acclimated. Michael

Yesod is cool though I know a little about that. Actually I have one question that what's the reason it has 'special' (a better word?) style at programming CSS and JavaScripts? Seems like no other frameworks doing that? (Correct me if I am wrong) Thanks. -Simon On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 9:38 PM, Christopher Done wrote:

On 17 June 2011 14:53, Michael Snoyman wrote:

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I'm not saying Happstack or Snap are bad frameworks, quite the opposite. But I don't think these generic "X isn't mature" or "Y has bad documentation" do much to help newcomers become acclimated.

I'll back this up, Yesod has quite an extensive book with tips and tricks including corner cases and such: http://www.yesodweb.com/book

I'd like to respectfully disagree with this assessment. I'm not quite

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sure what you mean by "mature", but Yesod has been developed actively for two years, has the vast majority of features you'll need on a project, is in use by many production settings and has the highest performance figures of any of the big three frameworks.

FWIW I think he means the API changes, not that the software itself is runtime-stable. The "developed actively" may imply a changing API. I don't know whether this is true, but I think that's what he meant.

Anyway, I doubt maturity as in runtime stability matters that much to newbies.

_______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners

I know that haml[1], sass[2] and CoffeeScript[3] that are used quite commonly in the ruby community for generating html, css and javascript respectively. I believe Yesod's primary motivation for using 'special' templates is the ability to make static guarantees about wether URLs, etc are valid, but they also alleviate some code repetition. I'd actually be very happy if Yesod supported the syntax from haml, etc, as it would be one less syntax to learn (not that the options offered take long to learn) and these languages are quite nice to write in. -- [1] http://haml-lang.com/ [2] http://sass-lang.com/ [3] http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/ On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 10:55 PM, Christopher Done wrote:

On 17 June 2011 16:49, Haisheng Wu wrote:

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Actually I have one question that what's the reason it has 'special' (a better word?) style at programming CSS and JavaScripts? Seems like no other frameworks doing that? (Correct me if I am wrong)

You don't really need a framework to do CSS https://github.com/chrisdone/amelie/blob/master/src/Amelie/View/Style.hs or JavaScript https://github.com/chrisdone/amelie/blob/master/src/Amelie/View/Script.hs in a first-class Haskell DSL. The benefit is that you can manipulate both at a kind of macro level, and benefit from Haskell's type system if you wish to make your JavaScript or CSS type-safe. _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners

That's a very good question, to which Chris and Lyndon have already hinted at the answer. But there's more to it than that: * Julius (Javascript) actually isn't a different syntax at all, it's simply a pass-through parser. * With Lucius and Cassius (for CSS), each one provides some syntactic sugar over plain CSS that people like. * All three languages allow for variable interpolation, including type-safe URL interpolation. * Lucius and Cassius automatically minify their output. * We get many compile-time checks, but on variable existence and correct typeness, and well-formedness of the file. * These systems compose very nicely via widgets. * And via these widgets, we're able to easily concatenate multiple templates into a single file to be efficiently served via one HTTP request. Michael On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 5:49 PM, Haisheng Wu wrote:

Yesod is cool though I know a little about that. Actually I have one question that what's the reason it has 'special' (a better word?) style at programming CSS and JavaScripts? Seems like no other frameworks doing that? (Correct me if I am wrong) Thanks. -Simon

On Fri, Jun 17, 2011 at 9:38 PM, Christopher Done wrote:

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On 17 June 2011 14:53, Michael Snoyman wrote:

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I'm not saying Happstack or Snap are bad frameworks, quite the opposite. But I don't think these generic "X isn't mature" or "Y has bad documentation" do much to help newcomers become acclimated.

I'll back this up, Yesod has quite an extensive book with tips and tricks including corner cases and such: http://www.yesodweb.com/book

...

I'd like to respectfully disagree with this assessment. I'm not quite sure what you mean by "mature", but Yesod has been developed actively for two years, has the vast majority of features you'll need on a project, is in use by many production settings and has the highest performance figures of any of the big three frameworks.

FWIW I think he means the API changes, not that the software itself is runtime-stable. The "developed actively" may imply a changing API. I don't know whether this is true, but I think that's what he meant. Anyway, I doubt maturity as in runtime stability matters that much to newbies. _______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners