Welcome to the Happstack Irregular News #1! - 2012-04-20 ======================================================== This is the first issue of the Happstack Irregular News which is published on an irregular basis. Today a bunch of new and updated packages where uploaded to hackage, so it seemed like a good time to make some news! Big thanks to Dag Odenhall, Roel van Dijk, and mekeor.melire for their contributions. Also big thanks to Niklas Broberg, Felipe Lessa, and Gershom Bazerman for being responsive maintainers of their respective packages! Details: NEW: happstack-clientsession ---------------------------- Dag built us a shiny new client-side session data library which stores session data in cookies. It builds on top of the clientsession library from Felipe Lessa and Michael Snoyman, adding the glue needed to make it easy to use with Happstack. The happstack-clientsession library is still new and only lightly tested. So, your feedback and patches are appreciated. The API might still be in flux (unless we managed to get it correct on the first try). hsx-jmacro & happstack-jmacro ------------------------------ Dag and I (mostly Dag) worked on the hsx-jmacro and happstack-jmacro packages. hsx-jmacro now includes a number of methods to embed XML generated via HSX inside javascript generated by JMacro. See the haddock documentation for some discussion and examples: http://www.happstack.com/docs/hsx-jmacro-7.0.1/doc/html/hsx-jmacro/HSX-JMacr... Also check out these examples: http://patch-tag.com/r/mae/happstack/snapshot/current/content/pretty/hsx-jma... http://patch-tag.com/r/mae/happstack/snapshot/current/content/pretty/hsx-jma... In the first example you will see these lines:

do let html :: DOMNode html = <p>Generate javascript from <span class="foo" id="h">HTML & XML</span>.</p>

which generate some simple HTML. Then in these lines, that html is added as a child of the main div using the normal javascript appendChild DOM function:

js :: JStat js = [jmacro| document.getElementById('main').appendChild(`(html)`); |]

Then we have our main handler function, which splices that Javascript into our final HTML document:

handler :: ServerPart XML handler = defaultTemplate "js-example" () <%> <div id="main" /> <% js %>

So, we saw both HSX being embedded into JMacro and JMacro being embedded into HSX. All the escaping is taking care of automatically for us. And we get to use very familiar looking HTML and Javascript syntax. Dag also made some improvements to happstack-jmacro to prevent global namespace pollution. The 'ToMessage JStat' instance now wraps the javascript inside an anonymous function before it is called. This helps avoid namespace collisions when you import multiple different javascript files (that are generated from JStat). There is also a new 'jmResponse :: ServerMonad m => JStat -> m Response' function which can be used to convert javascript (JStat) into a Response. 'jmResponse' ensures that all identifiers are unique by prefixing them with a hash computed from the rqUri. happstack-server ---------------- Dag and Mekeor added a few new functions to happstack-server. - serveFileFrom checks that the file being served is rooted in a specific parent directory. This is useful for preventing ../../etc/passwd type attacks when a portion of the filename is provided by the user. - combineSafe is a helper function which is used by serveFileFrom and can be reused in your own code - serveDirectory' is exactly like serveDirectory except that it allows you to provide the mime-type mapping function - neverExpires is a helper function that sets an 'Expires' header for as far in the future as is supported by most browsers I also modified happstack-server so that it can be built on platforms with out Template Haskell (such as ARM). happstack-hsp ------------- - analyticsAsync - a helper function that generates the Google Async Google Analytics Tracking Javascript code happstack-lite -------------- Type type-signature for serveFile now expects the mime-type function to be (FilePath -> IO String) instead of (FilePath -> ServerPart String) misc -------------- - a number of packages where updated to accept more recent dependenncies on mtl, transformers, hamlet, etc - Dag provided a bunch of documentation fixes to ixset Other News: =========== HSX ------------ HSX and friends still do not build from Hackage on GHC 7.4. I submitted patches to Niklas, which he has pulled into darcs, but not released on Hackage. However, we then started a long discussion about refactoring HSX so that it no longer depends on HJScript/HJavaScript, plus a bunch of other changes to make HSX easier to install and use. So, hopefully we will have a smaller, better HSX out soon. If you need HSX support on GHC 7.4 right now, you will want to fetch the source from darcs. You can find the darcs repos on patch-tag: http://patch-tag.com/r/nibro Unfortunately, you do not actually want the latest version from darcs, because some of the refactoring work has already begun. In the latest version of HSX, some of the associated types where renamed to avoid name classes. For example XML is now XMLType, Attribute is now AttributeType, etc. You will want to unpull the patches that make those changes. Hopefully this will be straightened out properly on Hackage in the next week. happstack-authenticate ---------------------- I also upgraded happstack-authenticate to the latest version of the authenticate library. The latest version of authenticate dropped support for facebook, so I updated the facebook connect support to use the fb package. Unfortunately, the fb package had not been updated to the latest conduits -- so I submitted a patch for that and a new fb 0.8 was released today! happstack-authenticate is still an 'alpha' package and has not been released on hackage yet. It is available from darcs if you wish to contribute: darcs get http://src.seereason.com/happstack-authenticate/ The major blockers to releasing on hackage are: 1. updating it so that it can take advantage of https:// 2. finishing the cookie code so that expired sessions are deleted 3. reviewing the code and making sure we are not doing anything obviously wrong security wise acme-http --------- In case you missed it, we released acme-http on April 1: https://groups.google.com/group/happs/browse_thread/thread/9b078d23b59a7374/... While the announcement and date are a bit jokey, the acme-http server is actually the beginnings of the new Happstack HTTP backend. It is a real server which allows us to investigate some of the low-level performance issues in very small and isolated environment. We will then apply what we learn to the real backend. acme-http delivered 221,693.0 req/s, making it the fastest Haskell web server on the planet. We expect to see a drop when we add things like support for timeouts, etc. But, we also hope to find some ways to increase the performance over the current baseline. web-routes for Snap ------------------- The web-routes package, which provides type-safe URLs, is intended to be usable with a wide range of Haskell web frameworks. Here is a demonstration of how web-routes can be used with Snap without modifying either library (though there is some boiler-plate that could be extracted): https://github.com/stepcut/snap-web-routes-demo Crash Course Updates -------------------- In response to user feedback the acid-state section of the documentation has received some rewritten. There is also a new section on the basics of using Template Haskell: http://www.happstack.com/docs/crashcourse/TemplateHaskell.html#template_hask... happstack.com updates --------------------- A lot of work has been going into behind the scenes improvements to the happstack.com website. Those changes should be rolling out soon! That's all the news that's fit to print! (and that I remember!). No extra charge for the typos!