[Haskell-cafe] [GSoC] WWW::Mechanize-like package for Haskell

[Thomas Schilling]

On 7 apr 2008, at 15.36, Yitzchak Gale wrote:

> Max Desyatov wrote:
>>> I'm interested in working on a library for a stateful web  
>>> browsing in
>>> Haskell during Google Summer of Code.
>
> Thomas Schilling wrote:
>>  Also, for a GSoC proposal you should try to convince the mentors,  
>> why your
>> project is useful for Haskell in general.  So maybe you have some  
>> more
>> arguments there, too.
>
> There are obviously zillions of uses for automating interaction with
> web pages. Perhaps you are asking why not just do it Perl or Python?
>
> One classic application is unit testing and stress testing of web- 
> based
> applications. There are also various lambdabot plugins that could
> be vastly cleaned up and extended.
>
> So it would be extremely useful to have an improved library for  
> this in
> Haskell.
>
> The next step would be to build various nice testing libraries on top
> of this for QuickCheck and various web programming frameworks,
> but that's already too much for one GSoC project. Something we
> could look forward to though.
>

I proposed this project last year, so I believe in its usefulness.   
But you just gave some very good reasons why mentors should rank  
Max's proposal highly.  So I hope Max will incorporate the above  
motivations in his proposal. :)

/ Thomas