Ehum, shameless plug. :) On 3/6/06, Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org> wrote:
Cale Gibbard wrote:
Ah, neat, I knew about WASH, but somehow I'd missed the fact that there was a server there :)
Interesting... at a casual glance, this looks as if it could be coming close to being a "full stack web application framework" for Haskell, looking to occupy the same kind of territory as systems like Java/Servlets+JSP+the rest, Ruby/Rails or Python/Turbogears (the last a package I'm currently using).
Have you looked at HSP [1]? This is exactly what the HSP project aims for, although there is quite some ways to go yet.
I think see: The web server CGI process dispatching Web page templating Relational database access
All of these are present in HSP.
Additional features of a full-stack web application framework that may or may not be present are:
- Support for longer-running web processes (implemented in haskell, of course)
HSP has that.
- An easy way to map incoming URIs to specific functions (hmm.. or to monadic values, I think)
I don't think I understand what you're after exactly, but I'm sure it's interesting, care to explain a bit further? :-)
- Easy mapping from Haskell data structures to underlying SQL - what would be called an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) in OO languages
Some of our students are working on bringing the power of Ruby/Rails to HSP, with emphasis on smooth database interfacing. Not sure exactly what this entails though, I've never used Rails... :-)
- Handling of interaction with a browser-side Javascript library for smoother AJAX support
This is not currently present in HSP, but they are surely on the conceptual todo-list. There is a design for a crude JavaScript support, but we'd certainly need more.
- Options to run the whole thing behind Apache to leverage its security and web space management capabilities
Lemmih has implemented a HSP/FastCGI binding for Apache. I also know that work is being done on building a direct HSP/Apache binding. All work in progress though.
I think that continuation-based web session state management, ala Smalltalk/Seaside, would be a very natural fit for a Haskell framework -- all handled by a "Web session monad", maybe. (Or maybe I just don't know what I'm talking about ;)
This is by far the biggest drawback of HSP today. There is no high-level support for continuations (other than explicitly defined continuations at top level).
How far are we from having such a framework for Haskell?
Depends on how many people would be willing to invest time in it. Right now we have students at Chalmers working on a project that aims towards such a framework, but they can only do so much in the time they have. We would surely welcome any help we could get. :-) /Niklas (ps. Going on vacation for 2 weeks in a few hours, so I'm not likely to respond for a while... ;-)) [1] http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~d00nibro/hsp/