[Haskell-cafe] Re: Oracle + Haskell advice?

[Brian Strand]

Bayley, Alistair wrote:
>>From: Brian Strand [mailto:bstrand at switchmanagement.com] 
>>
>>I've gotten takusen 
>>(http://cvs.sf.net/viewcvs.py/haskell-libs/libs/takusen/) 
>>to compile and run on my Suse 9.3 x86-64 box against Oracle 
>>10.1.
> 
> Cool. I'm keen for feedback. I can also give general advice as far as
> interfacing to Oracle is concerned.
> 
> To be fair, Takusen is usable, but far from feature-complete (no support for
> BLOBs, CLOBs, invoking procedures). You might want to compare it to
> HaskellDB over ODBC, if you can get HaskellDB running (I don't know how
> usable ODBC-on-Unix is). HaskellDB is a higher-level approach to database
> access, and might be better suited to "business apps".

So far Takusen is working great (once I figured out the proper incantations 
for getting "select * from dual" working, things went much faster...).  We 
don't currently use LOBs, and very rarely call stored procedures, so there's a 
happy match between Takusen's missing features and our unused features ;)  One 
thing we do use extensively is bind parameters; do you have any hints on 
getting doQueryBind working, or pointers on what's left to do there?  And is 
the version in CVS on sf.net a good place to start?


>>Before I wade in too deep, I'm wondering if anyone has done 
>>much "business 
>>app" programming with Haskell (where "business app" is rather 
>>fuzzily defined 
>>as database access, web UIs, interfacing with various systems 
>>over ip, etc.). 
> 
> As for the other stuff, here are a few projects which might interest you. I
> believe these represent the state-of-the-art in Haskell as far as this sort
> of stuff is concerned:
> 
>   http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/haskell/WASH/ : WASH, for
> building browser-based apps
>   http://www.haskell.org/haxr/ : HaXR, for XML-RPC (the "interfacing with
> various systems over ip" requirement)
>   http://www.repton-world.org.uk/mediawiki/index.php/HAIFA_Wiki : HAIFA.
> Looks like it does SOAP. See also:
>     http://haskell.org/~shae/haifa_tmr.pdf
> 
> There are also a few XML libraries around; I can't comment on how well these
> work.
> 
> It should be clear that there's not yet one clear bundle or approach that we
> can point to and say "here, use this". Like, say, Ruby-on-rails, Zope,
> Seaside, etc. Things are still a bit more DIY in Haskell land. I recommend
> starting with WASH and adding what you need from there.

I kind of suspected there would be a good deal of DIY...  Thanks for the 
pointers to other projects!

Brian