[Haskell-cafe] Can I use Haskell for web programming

[Bjorn Bringert]

Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> 
>>   Can I use Haskell to do what people do with, say, PHP?
> 
> 
> I wrote Hoogle (http://haskell.org/hoogle) using Haskell, without
> using any libraries - just directly as a console program. It's open
> source so you can download it and see how its done, if you want. Of
> course the web handling bit is more low level than WASH and HSP.

Warning: Shameless plugs follow

If you want to be somewhere in between the high-level WASH/HSP and the 
low-level implement-it-all-yourself approach, you may want to have a 
look at the following libraries.

The cgi package allows you to write CGI programs without caring about 
low-level communication with the webserver and stuff like how form data 
is encoded: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/haskell-cgi/

There is also a FastCGI wrapper you can use to get better performance 
from your CGI programs (written using the above library): 
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/haskell-fastcgi/

With the xhtml package you can create XHTML documents using simple 
Haskell functions: http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~bringert/darcs/haskell-xhtml/
It is a very simple adaptation of Andy Gill's Text.Html module.

The URLs above all point to darcs repos for the libraries.

/Björn

> On 21/01/06, Maurício <briqueabraque at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
>>   Hi,
>>
> 
> and more
> 
>>I have the need for that, and I've been looking into Ruby on Rails. Do
>>you thing Haskell could be a choice? Of course, I don't need something
>>exactly like PHP (for instance, I don't care if I can't insert code in
>>the middle of xhtml pages. If I have to generate everything from Haskell
>>code, I would probably like it. Also, CGI can be a choice). But I need
>>reasonable efficiency and to be able to find someone to host my site.
>>   What solutions do you suggest me?
>>
>>   Thanks,
>>   Maurício