On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 5:20 PM, Mark Lentczner <mark.lentczner@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 6:56 PM, Gershom Bazerman <gershomb@gmail.com> wrote:

... cgi doesn't feel like a core/common thing that is necessary to have in the platform ...

Considering the range of facilities provided by other language platforms (see my HIW talk two years ago), cgi, or some method of serving HTTP requests is well within a reasonable, common library collection these days. We should have a HTTP client as well.

The wai-frontend-monadcgi[1] package allows programs written against the cgi library to be run on any WAI backend, including Warp, FastCGI, and, of course, CGI[2]. I'd personally recommend people switch to WAI directly, but this adapter library makes it possible to take existing cgi applications and put them in a more modern stack.

Regarding the client side, I'd like to mention http-client[3] and http-client-tls[4]. The latter provides, to my knowledge, the only pure-Haskell HTTPS client library. I know people have raised security concerns about using the tls package due to lack of testing relative to OpenSSL, but I'm not sure if those arguments are so valid given recent events[5].

Michael

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/wai-frontend-monadcgi

[2] 10 internets to the first person who hosts a cgi-library-based application using the WAI CGI handler and sticks it all behind Mighty's CGI serving.

[3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/http-client

[4] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/http-client-tls

[5] http://heartbleed.com/