Hi Ozgun,<div><br></div><div>At the moment, I would say that Happstack is your best bet on a mature option for Haskell web development. There are other systems being developed, but none have been battle-tested as much as Happstack (as far as I know). I know that patch-tag[1] was written with it, for example.</div>
<div><br></div><div>That said, there&#39;s a lot of effort right now in expanding the web development landscape for Haskell. I suggest you subscribe to the web-devel mailing list and follow the discussions there. Jeremy Shaw, for example, is currently working on a package called URLT, which promises type-safe URLs. (I know the PHP project I&#39;m consulting on right now could *really* use this feature.)</div>
<div><br></div><div>Things are exciting right now, and you can probably have a lot of input on the direction of development. Also, if you want a more experimental framework, I&#39;ll recommend you check out Yesod[2] (which I am writing).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Michael</div><div><br></div><div>[1] <a href="http://patch-tag.com/">http://patch-tag.com/</a></div><div>[2] <a href="http://www.yesodweb.com/code.html">http://www.yesodweb.com/code.html</a><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 7:05 PM, Ozgun Ataman <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:ozataman@gmail.com">ozataman@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div style="word-wrap:break-word">Greetings all.<div><br></div><div>I have been for quite some time trying to assess the feasibility of using Haskell in relatively large, high volume, high availability, long-running web application projects. I have enjoyed learning and using Haskell very much for the past year and I often find myself missing various language features when reasoning about alternatives like Ruby (on Rails). If I can identify the right set of tools for the job, I would really like to take the plunge and make Haskell my standard go-to language in web applications.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Here are the couple of key questions that I wanted get your feedback on:</div><div><br></div><div><ol><li>Do you consider Haskell and its environment of libraries ready for prime time in web app development as defined above?</li>
<li>What collection of libraries would you use in such an effort?</li><li>What are the up and coming packages/technologies in Haskell-land you would watch out for?</li></ol></div><div><br></div><div>Also, here are some core requirements that I would define for such a project:</div>
<div><br></div><div><ul><li>Ease/speed of development in both back and front-ends, minimal boilerplate</li><li>Extendability and flexibility in iterative development</li><li>Robustness and reliability in production environment</li>
<li>High performance</li><li>Scalability</li><li>Ability to interface with new technologies in the future: Cassandra, Redis, memcached, etc.</li><li>Ease of implementing common/reusable features across web applications: user authentication, S3 file uploads, thumbnail/image handling, exception notifications, etc.</li>
</ul><div><br></div><div>In terms of libraries, I can think of a few key components (as pointed out by several others before) that one would need to arrange:</div><div><br></div><div><ul><li>Choice of server (happstack vs. alternatives)</li>
<li>Templating (xhtml vs. file templates vs. newer efforts like BlazeHtml)</li><li>Data/storage layer: HDBC vs. HaskellDB vs. others</li></ul></div><div><br></div><div>I know this is a common topic in Haskell-Cafe, but I have failed to identify conclusive opinions from experienced Haskellers out there in previous discussions. My apologies in advance if this is a blatantly redundant post.</div>
<div><br></div><div>All the best,</div><div>Ozgun</div><font color="#888888"><div><br></div></font></div></div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br></div>