[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Web Framework

[John A. De Goes]

We're talking about web applications and Web 2.0 sites, which is the  
principal target of Rails and its ilk. For primarily static content- 
oriented sites, static HTML works just fine, but even in this case,  
you can do dynamic transformations on the HTML in order to provide a  
richer, more user-friendly surfing experience.

It's only a matter of time until browsers provide better accessibility  
for web apps and search engines start indexing JavaScript-generated  
content.

The era of HTML templates and heavy server-side HTML is coming to a  
close, for all but static content-oriented websites. The whole  
industry is moving in a dynamic direction (along with developer tools  
and libraries), and it would be a shame if a bunch of Haskell  
developers got together to write a really great Haskell web framework  
for the Internet as it was 5 years ago.

Times have changed. Haskell -> JavaScript is a much more fruitful  
direction to pursue, I think.

Regards,

John A. De Goes
N-BRAIN, Inc.
The Evolution of Collaboration

http://www.n-brain.net    |    877-376-2724 x 101

On Jan 26, 2009, at 10:49 AM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 26, 2009 at 9:37 AM, John A. De Goes <john at n-brain.net>  
> wrote:
>
> The best approach is to push as much functionality into the client  
> as possible. The ideal server-side framework consists of nothing  
> more than a permissions-based interface to persistence and network  
> services. That's it. Everything else is done on the client side, in  
> JavaScript.
>
> Web designers can pretty easily style dynamically generated HTML, if  
> the semantics are good -- you just need to let them capture that  
> HTML in any given part of the application.
>
> What this means is that effort is probably best directed at Yhc/ 
> JavaScript and similar projects, which compile Haskell to JavaScript  
> for execution on the client. Sure, some server-side work needs to be  
> done, but it's extremely minimal. Far more needs to be done on the  
> client-side. There's not many people working on that and the  
> infrastructure is in need of more creative input and development  
> resources.
>
> That's great in theory, but then you end of with inaccessible web  
> sites, those without Javascript are left out in the cold, and search  
> engines won't index you. I think any framework should transparently  
> make a site work the way you describe and as plain HTML.

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