Bayley, Alistair wrote:
From: Brian Strand [mailto:bstrand@switchmanagement.com]
I've gotten takusen (http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/haskell-libs/libs/takusen/) to compile and run on my Suse 9.3 x86-64 box against Oracle 10.1.
Cool. I'm keen for feedback. I can also give general advice as far as interfacing to Oracle is concerned.
To be fair, Takusen is usable, but far from feature-complete (no support for BLOBs, CLOBs, invoking procedures). You might want to compare it to HaskellDB over ODBC, if you can get HaskellDB running (I don't know how usable ODBC-on-Unix is). HaskellDB is a higher-level approach to database access, and might be better suited to "business apps".
So far Takusen is working great (once I figured out the proper incantations for getting "select * from dual" working, things went much faster...). We don't currently use LOBs, and very rarely call stored procedures, so there's a happy match between Takusen's missing features and our unused features ;) One thing we do use extensively is bind parameters; do you have any hints on getting doQueryBind working, or pointers on what's left to do there? And is the version in CVS on sf.net a good place to start?
Before I wade in too deep, I'm wondering if anyone has done much "business app" programming with Haskell (where "business app" is rather fuzzily defined as database access, web UIs, interfacing with various systems over ip, etc.).
As for the other stuff, here are a few projects which might interest you. I believe these represent the state-of-the-art in Haskell as far as this sort of stuff is concerned:
http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/haskell/WASH/ : WASH, for building browser-based apps http://www.haskell.org/haxr/ : HaXR, for XML-RPC (the "interfacing with various systems over ip" requirement) http://www.repton-world.org.uk/mediawiki/index.php/HAIFA_Wiki : HAIFA. Looks like it does SOAP. See also: http://haskell.org/~shae/haifa_tmr.pdf
There are also a few XML libraries around; I can't comment on how well these work.
It should be clear that there's not yet one clear bundle or approach that we can point to and say "here, use this". Like, say, Ruby-on-rails, Zope, Seaside, etc. Things are still a bit more DIY in Haskell land. I recommend starting with WASH and adding what you need from there.
I kind of suspected there would be a good deal of DIY... Thanks for the pointers to other projects! Brian