HSP: big on "dynamic pages". I don't want to make my webserver able to compile Haskell code. Develop code, compile, test, make sure it's right, then push to production every 6 months around here.
Being one of the main developers of HSP, I guess I should reply to this. :-) HSP is indeed big on dynamic pages, if by dynamic you mean pages that can return different results on different calls. The compile-on-demand feature used to be a part of the old runtime for HSP, but in the current incarnation that has been lifted out. And HSP as such is much more a programming model - an API basically - than any particular deployment scheme. HSP's basic model is much more low-level than e.g. WASH, as we haven't really had time to add any flesh to the bare bones yet. But looking at the bright side, at least we don't have a hard to use event model... And HSP would definitely give you control over the names of elements if you find that you need it. There is - currently - no built-in support for form validation in HSP, bare bones and all that, but it's definitely a feature that we would *like* to support. We just haven't gotten there yet. So if you wanted to use HSP, we would be happy to accept a feature request from you. It would be great to be able to have actual use cases to work with to help the design of such form validation. Easy support for SQL databases is another feature high up on the wish list. Right now it should be about as easy as as from any other Haskell application, except... ...HSP also currently only supports CGI, but that's perhaps the number one priority to get it working in different environments. We were thinking primarily of using the HAppS server utility as a runtime environment, but FastCGI support would perhaps be an even easier task. Again, a feature request would be most welcome, with some ideas for what you want to get out of the FastCGI integration. Also, one of the explicit design goals of HSP from the very beginning has been to make it easy to understand for non-Haskell users. Just like PHP allows you to take the step from writing static HTML pages to writing dynamic PHP pages without pause, we wanted to "lure" prospective web programmers into the Haskell world and in the darkness bind them... Maybe something for your co-workers? :-) So to summarize, HSP is a very simple model - perhaps *too* simple right now - and aims to support much of what you ask for in a not too distant future. Please drop a few feature requests our way so we have something tangible to work with. Feature requests go here: http://code.google.com/p/hsp/issues/entry Cheers, /Niklas