Hi Michael, no, the message was not meant to be off-list, that was just me pressing the wrong button :-) Regarding happstack, I do not believe that there is a contrast with your effort, the core of happstack is in its persistency mechanism not in its http interface so I think it would be great to engage the happstack community in this effort. We have so many half-baked and dispersed attempts in the web area that any attempt at consolidation can only be welcome. Personally I have been using happstack for a few years though now I am running it behind a nginx server because of its known deficiencies (no HTTPS etc). titto P.S. I will be away for a few days and unable to answer my email 2010/1/13 Michael Snoyman :

Not sure if you replied off-list on purpose or not, but I'll continue this off list for the moment. I think we have a bit of a problem in the Haskell web community: you've got the Happstack camp and then the rest of us. "The rest of us" need to rally around *something*, and it seems that Hack didn't get people's attention for some reason.

I'm happy to write WAI, but I'd like more to make it a community effort. You have any thoughts on this? My first stab at the idea is to create a github repo, write the code, and then try to get people to comment on it. However, I also want to give it at least a day so I can get people's feedback on this e-mail.

What have you been using for Haskell web development until now? It seems like each non-Happstack person has a totally different approach, and I'd like to try and consolidate this together somehow.

Michael

On Wed, Jan 13, 2010 at 11:12 PM, Pasqualino "Titto" Assini wrote:

...

A unified web app interface would be a God-sent, please please go ahead.

Regarding point 1, I find hack interface nice and clean and would like to see something similar.

Regarding point 2 I vote for correctness/performance vs convenience.

    titto

2010/1/13 Michael Snoyman :

...

Hi,

I recently read (again) the wiki page on a web application interface[1] for Haskell. It seems like this basically works out to Hack[2], but using an enumerator instead of lazy bytestring in the response type. Is anyone working on implementing this? If not, I would like to create the package, though I wouldn't mind some community input on some design decisions:

* Hack has been fairly well-tested in the past year and I think it provides the features that people want. Therefore, I would want to model the Environment variable for WAI from Hack. I *could* just import Hack in WAI and use the exact same Environment data type. Thoughts?

* If using a different data type for Environment, should I replace the String parts with ByteStrings? On the one hand, ByteStrings are the "correct" data type since the HTTP protocol does not specify a character encoding; on the other hand, Strings are easier to deal with.

* It's simple to write a function to convert between a lazy bytestring and an enumerator, meaning it would be very easy to write conversion functions between Hack and WAI applications. This would make it simpler for people to use either backend.

If someone else is already working on WAI, please let me know, I don't want to have duplicate implementations. The idea here is to consolidate, not split the community. I have a few Hack handlers (simpleserver, cgi, fastcgi) that I would happily convert to WAI handlers as well.

Michael

[1] http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/WebApplicationInterface [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hack

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-- Pasqualino "Titto" Assini, Ph.D. http://quicquid.org/

-- Pasqualino "Titto" Assini, Ph.D. http://quicquid.org/