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

[Gwern Branwen]

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On Thu, Jan 1, 2009 at 9:04 AM, Sebastiaan Visser  wrote:
> 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!
>
>
> [1] http://funct.org/wiki/
> [2] http://funct.org/wiki/data/Index.html
> [3] http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/HUT/AttributeGrammarSystem

Miscellaneous comments:
1) You're right about cabal-install versus runhaskell etc. There seems
to be a(nother) Control.Exception issue with cabal-install using
base-4:
src/Network/Orchid/Backend/DarcsBackend.hs:91:29:
    Couldn't match expected type `IOException'
           against inferred type `Exception'
      Expected type: IO (Either IOException String)
      Inferred type: IO (Either Exception String)
    In the second argument of `()', namely
        `(try (U.readFile (repo /+ file)) ::
            IO (Either IOException String))'
    In the expression:
          eitherToMaybe

          (try (U.readFile (repo /+ file)) :: IO (Either IOException String))
2) Have you looked into integrating with Pandoc for generating TeX,
PDFs, etc. (instead of rolling your own)? Seems to work fairly well
for Gitit.
3) Is it just me, or is the fancy AJAX interface - as nice as it is -
rather slow?
4) In orchid-demo, I notice it by default looks in /tmp for its
datafiles. Is there some particular reason why a better default
wouldn't be looking in ./? I was wondering how orchid-demo would do
for a personal wiki, where it makes most sense to have a ~/wiki
directory to keep all the files in.
5) Setting up orchid-demo is not all that clear; I figured out that
you want to run 'orchid-demo --extract' to set up a stock
configuration and repo, and then one can just run 'orchid-demo', but I
think a better way would be to look in the default location for files
and if orchid-demo doesn't find any, then fall back to --extract and
look again.

- --
gwern
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