Re: [Haskell-cafe] Writing a web service client

Hello, Thanks for all the links. It seems that I have a lot to study before I produce a decent library :) The Network.HTTP package looks nice too. It seems to be at the right level of abstraction compared to Network.Browser. I have to get used with searching the Hackage repository... :) On 5/25/10 3:12 PM, Christopher Done wrote:

Hello Ionut,

On 25 May 2010 13:26, Ionut G. Stan wrote:

...

The first step that I want to undertake is to write a client library for the GitHub API, so my questions would be:

1. Is there any such library?

I don't know of nor have seen such a library on Hackage or Github. There was some brief talk on StackOverflow[1], but nothing about a full library. I would be interested in using such a library as I am an enthusiastic user of Github.

[1]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1816092/using-the-github-gist-api-from-ha...

...

2. What other client library should I consider as an API model? Or maybe there's some paper/blog post on how do design a Haskell API?

There are some good examples of Haskell code that uses REST-ish APIs.[1][2][3][4]

Regarding designing a Haskell API, Real World Haskell has some chapters about that.[5]

My personal advice would be at least to ensure you make it cabal-install-able, so that entails having a proper cabal file, documented with Haddock format, with QuickCheck test cases if appropriate, and provide one or two examples in the documentation, see Don's guide about writing a Haskell program[8].

[1]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/flickr [2]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/twitter [3]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/feed-cli [4]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/Bitly [5]: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/writing-a-library-working-with-json-da... [6]: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/io-case-study-a-library-for-searching-... [7]: http://book.realworldhaskell.org/read/advanced-library-design-building-a-blo... [8]: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/How_to_write_a_Haskell_program

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3. What network package do people use for accessing simple, rest-like web services? Network.Curl? If not, which other?

Network.Curl is OK but it relies on a C library which is another dependency and it's maybe preferable to use the HTTP library or similar library written in pure Haskell, that you can find on Hackage.

-- Ionuț G. Stan | http://igstan.ro