Whilst I Agree with you about Apache being widely useful, most websites fall into the category database backend, dynamic content in the middle and HTTP infront. Apache is a waste of disc space and memory, if all you want is Haskell Servlets (Think Java Servlets and Tomcat - a large number of major projects are done on tomcat which is a server written in Java, completely stand alone from Apache). Further to this HTTP is quite a simple protocol, and its implementation in Haskell quite easy - there is really no need for a complete implementation of the standard - you only really need put and get... When using servlets there is no need for CGI or FastCGI, the server is written in Haskell, the Servlets are written in Haskell, you use the ghci-linker to load up the pages - although for high demand services it is better to compile the pages into the server for better speed. A record is used to parse the request to the servlet. The setup we use - with real paying customers - is an implementation of HTTP in haskell - Authentication is provided by a plug-in, and like most sites uses on-page login/password boxes, the server provides session management, so the Servlet simply has to deal with page generation and parsing user-feedback. A database backend using ODBC means we can change database without major code rewrites. Everything is in Haskell (apart from the DB) and this setup will do 90% of the things you would ever want a dynamic web site to do... (The other 10% does not justify code bloat in the server - for those 10% use different tools) Regards, Keean Schupke... Peter Simons wrote:
Keean writes:
Interesting!
But, think of the advantages of a type-safe web-server, utilising GHC's light weight threads...
Well, yes, but the problem is that web server today must provide tons of things to be suitable for production use. Authentication, CGI, even FastCGI come to my mind, etc., etc. I don't think something like Apache can be re-built from scratch very easily, so it's good that Haskell support for it is available.
Peter
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