[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Web Framework

[Michael Snoyman]

>
> I´m working in a web application rather than a web framework. But I
> sometimes think about how a complete web application server should be. For
> my case, I don´t care about the presentation, because HSP is more than
> enough. However, I need active-active clustering, distributed transactions
> and workflows. I have created the module Workflow for the latter. For the
> former, I developped TCache, that is a transactional cache using STM, with
> configurable persistence. It´s like  hibernate for Java and (the data part
> of) Rails for Rubi. Now I´m working in a extension of TCache with
> distributed transactions and remote clustering with some additonal
> interesting characteristics.
>

That all sounds like something that would fit very nicely into this
framework that I'm addressing.


> My own view about haskell and Web applications is  that something  like " a
> web framework" is not in the philosophy of Haskell.  What is in the
> philosophy of Haskell is the creation of modules that the people can combine
> to create their own web frameworks.
>

I agree to a certain extent. If you look at the code that I've written so
far, it's in "layers." The bottom layer defines a Request and Response
object, defines a service as "Request -> IO Response", and a server as
something as essentially "Service -> IO ()". The next layer is a controller
which is itself a service. View details are built on top of this.

In your case, you could bypass all the controller logic if you like and
simply deal with the server definition. You would get the advantage of
having your app work as a standalone server, a CGI program, FastCGI, or
anything else that people write adapters for. Someone else might decide to
use the the controller and ignore the specialized view code (they really
like dealing with straight Strings perhaps).

However, I think we should develop a full stack so that it is available for
those that want it. From my Django experience, I must say that very few
things are cooler than calling a script which automatically generates all
the boilerplate code inherent in every web app. I think those features
should be available to those who want it (even if it's not in the spirit of
Haskell), while those who want to treat the "framework" as a set of
libraries need not been hindered by the extra features.

Michael
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