[Haskell-cafe] [ANN] Haskell web server + wiki: salvia-0.0.4 + orchid-0.0.6

[Sebastiaan Visser]

Happy new year, you all!

I'm pleased to announce three new packages on Hackage:

   * salvia-0.0.4: A lightweight modular web server framework.

   * orchid-0.0.6: A(nother) Wiki written in Haskell, currently using  
Darcs as a versioning back-end and Salvia as the application server.   
Orchid ships as a library that can be installed as a server module for  
the Salvia framework.

   * orchid-demo-0.0.4: A simple demo application using Salvia and  
Orchid to serve an example darcs repository.

An online demo of the wiki can be found at [1]. The front-end is a  
typical Ajax application and heavily relies on the availability of  
JavaScript. A more plain (REST like) web interface to system can be  
found at [2]. You can signup, login and edit/create some pages. Feel  
free to play around, it's just a demo.

Orchid has an abstract notion of a versioning back-end, theoretically  
allowing for multiple versioning systems. Currently only a Darcs back- 
end is available, but it shouldn't be too much work to implement a  
liaison for Git, Subversion, Mercurial etc.

The Wiki uses its own experimental document system with printers to  
HTML, LaTeX, PDF via LaTeX and some others in the making. The system  
makes us of the UUAGC [3] attribute grammar system, but is not  
required in order to build the package. The document system is plug-in  
based allowing easy addition of new structures. There are currently  
plug-ins for inline LaTeX formulae, HSColour'ed Haskell code snippets  
and a table of contents. Some others in the making.

Be aware, this is an early release to allow people the play around  
with the packages and enable me to see how this all behaves in the  
wild. The tools are not yet finished and I cannot guarantee any form  
of stability. But, in my experience, they seem to `just work'. Most of  
the time.

I had some trouble getting all dependencies right on systems other  
than my own. Using `cabal install' seems to behave differently from `./ 
Setup install' in the package directory, but this may vary from system  
to system. It is known to work at least on Macosx and Linux with GHC  
6.8, 6.10 or even 6.11. Pdflatex is needed for PDF generation, dvipng  
for inline formulas.

Have fun and best wishes for this new year!

--
Sebastiaan


[1] http://funct.org/wiki/
[2] http://funct.org/wiki/data/Index.html
[3] http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/HUT/AttributeGrammarSystem