2008/10/26 Enzo Haussecker <ehaussecker@gmail.com>:
I would like to announce the publication of InputYourData.com (beta) － the online resource tool for financial, mathematical and scientific calculations. All web applications found at http://inputyourdata.com/ are written solely in Haskell and based on the Network.CGI framework. This website began as an experiment to familiarize myself with the monadic features of Haskell and their use in web programming. Namely, the mapping and manipulation of user inputs as typed objects. Through these experiments I found that Haskell allows for an efficient system where a variety of operations can be preformed while minimizing as many resources (such as time and memory space) as possible. I am now interested in developing a similar type of website, except wiki style － where all web applications are created by the user. Essentially, I am designing a web application where users can symbolically declare the arguments of a function and that function's call based on arbitrary variables. For example, say a user would like to create a web application to compute the roots of a second degree polynomial. He/she would simply declare the arguments to her function － three complex numbers a b and c, and the call of that function － (-b ± sqrt (b^2 - 4*a*c))/(2*a). The product of that users inputs will render a web application that looks similar to http://inputyourdata.com/cgi-bin/quadratic.cgi (all text is to be updated by the user as well). As one could imagine, other, more complex functions invo lving vectors, matrices, stock prices, and other arguments can also be defined in terms of arbitrary variables and declared as an inputs to my wiki-style web application.
That sounds interesting, certainly. But out of curiosity, how would you handle the security aspect? It sounds like the utility of such a wiki lies in letting the user use the full power of Haskell for development & configuration (which has worked out well for XMonad) - but obviously that implies letting random users run arbitrary code on your host. Are you going to just sandbox the web server in a chroot or something?
If you are intrigued by this project and you have substantial experience in designing Haskell-based web applications, please send me your resume and a brief summery of why you are interested. Regards, Enzo Haussecker
-- gwern