[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Web Framework

[Michael Snoyman]

>
> I am interested in contributing to a Haskell web framework.  :)
>
> I have started an attempt to create my own Haskell web framework, but I got
> busy working on my Master's thesis research, so I had to stop working on
> it...  I was a web developer at a start-up company for 1.5yrs with Ruby on
> Rails, and I really really like the MVC design; however, I prefer a stricter
> MVC implementation than Rails provides.  More specifically, I don't think
> code should appear in the view at all.  I believe that using html tags, the
> web framework can provide a function to "render" the view which would parse
> the html tags and insert the content (whatever it may be).  Functions can be
> easily composed together to build more complex content in the views.  For
> example,
>
> <person id="name"></person>
> <person id="age"></person>
>
> person_name =
>   renderView "person" "name" "John Doe"
>
> person_age =
>   renderView "person" "age" "40"
>
> I can show you my code which implements this parsing in a more structured
> manner, but I think this stricter MVC implementation leads to more
> maintenable projects and especially facilitates a graphic designer to work
> independent of the web developer since the graphic designer won't be
> confused by the code in the views.
>
> What do you think?


Are you saying that you specify the view in an XML file and then render it
using Haskell code? If that's what you mean, one question: why bother with
the XML at all? I've experimented both with writing HTML which gets rendered
by code, or writing code that creates the HTML, and I think the latter is
more flexible (think of the Text.XHtml hierarchy here). I would like to
differ from Text.XHtml in two significant ways:

1. It would be nice if we set it up to only allow valid attributes. For
example, a div tag should not have a src attribute.
2. We should intend from the beginning to have more high-level widgets. For
example, I have in my codebase a navbar widget, which takes a list of links
(both ILink and ELink, if you read my blog post) and produces the HTML,
setting a class "current" on the link to the current page. That last part is
often times a burden to program but provides a very nice user interface.

I hope that last example gives more insight into what I'm looking for with
these higher-level views. I have more examples if people are interested, I
just didn't want to cause an information overload right away... well, at
least nor more of an information overload than a 14-points blog post will in
general cause.

Michael
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