On Mon, Apr 7, 2008 at 4:11 PM, Thomas Schilling
It doesn't have to be perfect. Make sure you know how to use monad transformers. Also take a look at tag soup and the various HTML/XML parsers. I'm sure there's plenty to work on.
My guess would be, that you try to write non-trivial example applications and see what is needed. For example, you could write a script to download/upload a Haskell wiki page logging in if necessary. Take a look of what other WWW::Mechanize packages are used. That kind of stuff.
Also, for a GSoC proposal you should try to convince the mentors, why your project is useful for Haskell in general. So maybe you have some more arguments there, too.
/ Thomas
There's many benefits of having such library in Haskell: improved automated testing (as Yitzchak Gale mentioned) due to pure nature of inner algorithms (BrowserAction can be pure and be transformed into IO only on demand), static typing (just hate a bunch of stupid bugs while writing all those scripts in python/perl). We can use powerful HTML/XML parsers available there in Haskell (HXT with its "arrowed" XML filters). Haskell community will definitely benefit from such library. Firstly, as I see, in indirect way: I know many people that don't want to use or learn more about Haskell, saying it lacks libraries for their everyday work. Network libraries still aren't "cool" enough, and personally I want to improve them at least to the point when I can say "look! here's the network libraries and they aren't worse than yours, even better: pure and checked!" :). Secondly, new libraries are useful for the community directly, we have aforementioned lambdabot, e.g. I'd like to write some bots looking at new changes at haskellwiki or something like that, thing I'm doomed to code in sh&curl/perl/python now. -- Max