"Cale Gibbard" <cgibbard@gmail.com> writes:

Looks like there's an updated version here which supports dynamically loadable plugins: http://www.mdstud.chalmers.se/~md9ms/hws-wp/

Peter Thiemann has a more recent version that uses hs-plugins: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/haskell/WASH/ -- I've tried to teach people autodidactism, | ScannedInAvian.com but it seems they always have to learn it for themselves.| Shae Matijs Erisson

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). I think see: The web server CGI process dispatching Web page templating Relational database access 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) - An easy way to map incoming URIs to specific functions (hmm.. or to monadic values, I think) - Easy mapping from Haskell data structures to underlying SQL - what would be called an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) in OO languages - Handling of interaction with a browser-side Javascript library for smoother AJAX support - Options to run the whole thing behind Apache to leverage its security and web space management capabilities 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 ;) How far are we from having such a framework for Haskell? #g -- Cale Gibbard wrote:

On 06/03/06, Shae Matijs Erisson <shae@scannedinavian.com> wrote:

...

"Cale Gibbard" <cgibbard@gmail.com> writes:

...

Looks like there's an updated version here which supports dynamically loadable plugins: http://www.mdstud.chalmers.se/~md9ms/hws-wp/ Peter Thiemann has a more recent version that uses hs-plugins: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/haskell/WASH/

Ah, neat, I knew about WASH, but somehow I'd missed the fact that there was a server there :)

- Cale _______________________________________________ Haskell mailing list Haskell@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell

-- Graham Klyne For email: http://www.ninebynine.org/#Contact

On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 00:06 +0100, Niklas Broberg wrote:

On 3/6/06, Graham Klyne <GK@ninebynine.org> wrote:

...

- 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? :-)

Hm, i remember seeing this in ruby on rails i think. You would like to be able to map http://www.domain.com/show or http://www.domain.com/show etc. to haskell-functions that spits out webpages. With all this defined in one file?

...

- 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... :-)

This is basically some sort of database abstraction which is somewhat inspired by ActiveRecord in Rails. In short we let the programmer define its database in a spec-file. Mostly things you'd do anyway using a list of CREATE TABLE in an SQL-file. However we have a different syntax and some extra attributes that can be set to define what sort of relations different tables has to each other (one to one, one to many and many to many). We plan on extending this later (maybe software TRIGGER's and CASCADE'ing and some sort of contstraints). This spec-file is then supposed to create an empty database conforming to the spec and Haskell modules containing HaskellDB defintions together with generated helper functions for retreiving data from your database. This together with support for "Higher Order Queries" should make it both easy and fast to do database actions without giving up on flexibility. At least that is our goal.

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- 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.

This is quite important.

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- 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.

Yes. Two guys in my group is working on this. Haven't made any progress as of yet 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).

I would really like to know exactly what this means. Are there any examples or papers on this?

...

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. :-)

Hopefully we will a real homepage up pretty soon and tell the world what we are working on. Hopefully some of us would like to actively continue on this project after spring when we need to show something. Mattias

Hello Shae, Friday, March 10, 2006, 5:19:19 PM, you wrote:

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- Easy mapping from Haskell data structures to underlying SQL - what would be called an Object-Relational Mapper (ORM) in OO languages

SME> For this, what about SerTH[1] on top of HaskellDB? my Streams library contains even better serialization abilities. it's still undocumented, though. if someone need a serialization lib, please yell me - as true lazy programmer, i better work on demand ;) just a list of features implemented in this lib: - class-based AltBinary interface plus emulation of NewBinary library interface - compatibility with Hugs and GHC, with GHC-specific speed optimizations - (de)serialization speed of 20-60 mb/sec on 1GHz CPU - free intermixing of text and binary i/o on the same Stream - support for byte-aligned and bit-aligned, low-endian and big-endian serialization using the same interface - classical Binary class with "get" and "put_" functions defines default representation for each type - get/put_ uses fixed-size encoding for Int8..Word64, but variable-length encoding for Int/Word/Integer (including encoding of array bounds and list lengths) - any integral value can be saved with explicitly specified size using functions "putBits bh bits value" and "getBits bh bits" (their shortcuts putBit/putWord8...putWord64/getBit/... is also supported for all integral types) - get/put_ uses UTF8 encoding for strings/chars - Binary class instances (i.e. get/put_ implementation) for Bounded Enum, Storable and all array types - lots of alternative representations for Strings, lists and arrays, including ability to use user-supported function to read/write each list/array element, such as "putMArrayWith (putBits 15) h arr". for example, "putString0With (latin1Encode.putWord8) h s" implements ASCIIZ string encoding - Template Haskell used to automatically derive new Binary instances - ability to serialize data to any Stream, including Handle, raw files, memory-mapped files, memory and string buffers, pipes, network sockets and so on - after all, it can work in any monad. the only thing required for it's work is something supporting ByteStream interface, i.e. implementing vGetByte and vPutByte operations in some monad ... and i still not mentioned some features such as (encode :: a->String) and decode functions. i think that i implemented in this lib everything that anyone (except for Einar ;)) ever imagined :) -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin@gmail.com