Congratulations to the new release, and may I say that the homepage looks smashing! :D

Thanks!

Before I saw happstack-wai I had a quick look at the happstack API and saw that the Request keeps the request body as a (lazy?) String.

Hmm. I am not sure what you are referring to.

Looking a the Request type:

http://www.happstack.com/docs/happstack-server-7.0.0/doc/html/happstack-server/Happstack-Server-Types.html#t:Request

we see that the rqBody as the type:

rqBody :: MVar RqBody

and RqBody is defined as:

newtype RqBody = Body { unBody :: L.ByteString } deriving (Read,Show,Typeable)

So, it is, as you would expect, a lazy ByteString. RqData is defined as a ByteString in HAppS as well.. so it is always been that way in Happstack.

The MVar is there so that you can process the request body as it streams over the network and have it garbage collected as you go. For example, when saving a file upload to disk, the whole file does not get sucked into RAM.

There are other places in happstack-server where we use String instead of ByteString or Text. That is mostly because happstack was started back in 2004. So, I am pretty sure it predates the existence of ByteString, and it is definitely older than Text.

Most places that should be a ByteString have been updated. Not all places that could be Text are yet. We will see more modernization in that area in Happstack 8.

- jeremy