[Haskell-cafe] RE: [Haskell] Re: Trying On Learn Haskell Web Server

[Bayley, Alistair]

[Moving to café]

> From: haskell-bounces at haskell.org 
> [mailto:haskell-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Mattias Bengtsson
> 
> 
> > > I think that continuation-based web session state management, ala
> > > Smalltalk/Seaside, would be a very natural fit for a 
> Haskell framework -- all
> > > handled by a "Web session monad", maybe.  (Or maybe I 
> just don't know what I'm
> > > talking about ;)
> > 
> > This is by far the biggest drawback of HSP today. There is no
> > high-level support for continuations (other than explicitly defined
> > continuations at top level).
> 
> I would really like to know exactly what this means. Are there any
> examples or papers on this?


I have a lot of links... which I'll feel free to spam you and the list with :-)

Here a list of continuation-based web-frameworks that I know about; there may be more:

Cocoon (Java + Javascript)  http://cocoon.apache.org/
Borges (Ruby)  http://borges.rubyforge.org/
Wee (Ruby)  http://www.ntecs.de/blog/Wee
WASH (Haskell)  http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/haskell/WASH/
Seaside (Smalltalk)  http://www.seaside.st/
PLT Scheme (Scheme)  http://www.plt-scheme.org/  (can't find the actual library)
Siscweb (Scheme)  http://siscweb.sourceforge.net/
Uncommon Web (Common Lisp)  http://common-lisp.net/project/ucw/
Rife (Java)  http://rifers.org


One of the first people (but not the only, I think) to recognise that continuations were a good way of modelling web interations was Christian Queinnec:
http://www-spi.lip6.fr/~queinnec/PDF/www.pdf
http://www-spi.lip6.fr/~queinnec/Papers/webcont.ps.gz

Probably the best-known such framework is Seaside (ironic, as Smalltalk doesn't natively support continuations, AFAIK):
http://www.seaside.st/

Phil Wadler is also doing something along these lines in Links, I believe:
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/links/

Excellent summary of problems with REST and continuations (Dave Roberts):
http://www.findinglisp.com/blog/2004/11/web-application-design-rest-of-story.html

IBM article, mainly about Cocoon - a Java + Javascript framework:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/java/library/j-contin.html

More hype:
http://phirate.exorsus.net/wiki/doku.php?id=web_development_in_2005
http://phirate.exorsus.net/wiki/doku.php?id=further_discussion_of_continuations_and_sessions
http://phirate.exorsus.net/wiki/doku.php?id=sessions_and_state

Bill Clementson's postings (he's a Lisper):
http://bc.tech.coop/blog/041229.html


Alistair
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