Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: Webwire 0.1.0, netwire 1.2.5

On Fri, Sep 16, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Ertugrul Soeylemez wrote:

Michael Snoyman wrote:

...

Nice to see another project taking advantage of WAI and Shakespeare. I look forward to seeing some example code as well, though I personally am very wary of continuation-based frameworks.

AFRP uses continuations under the hood, so you can view webwire as continuation-based to some extent.  But out of interest, why are you wary?  This is highly experimental work, and I see some problems coming:

 * Lower performance, though that can be fixed.  Right now I'm getting    up to about 8000 requests per second using apachebench with -n 10000    and -c 1000, which is probably not enough for high volume sites.

 * Sessions are a runtime-only phenomenon.  This is a more serious    problem, for which I don't currently have a general solution, though    for most applications specialized solutions can be written.

 * FRP and netwire in particular have a steep learning curve.

If you see any further potential problems, I'd be very grateful, if you'd let me know.

I'm not sure what you mean by runtime-only, could you clarify? The reason I'm wary of continuation-based frameworks is that (at least from what I've seen) they are purposely non-RESTful. I know REST is a buzzword, but the other way to put it is: you're going to end up working against most of what HTTP is doing. There are good reasons why HTTP is stateless, and that shouldn't be circumvented lightly. I don't want to go too far on this right now, as I'm not an expert on cont-based frameworks, and I'm certainly not sure how webwire works. But from what I've seen in the past, you end up with ugly URLs and bad caching behavior. I think web developers *should* have to think about the fact that a page request is an inherently stateless operations, and storing state data should be a huge exception[1], not the norm. Michael [1] Obviously, there are some *common* exceptions, like authentication.