[Haskell-cafe] Is Haskell a Good Choice for Web Applications? (ANN: Vocabulink)

[Chris Forno]

I decided to find out for myself. You can find the results at
http://jekor.com/article/is-haskell-a-good-choice-for-web-applications

Included is the source code for the web application powering
http://www.vocabulink.com/

The source is roughly 2,000 lines of Haskell, along with some SQL and
JavaScript. It's written in literate style and includes a 75-page PDF.
It demonstrates and explains how to:

 * use FastCGI to communicate with a web server (nginx in this case)
 * move data to and from a PostgreSQL database (HDBC)
 * authenticate users with cookies
 * interact with users via asynchronous JavaScript and JSON (AJAJ)
 * collect data with HTML forms (formlets)
 * communicate with users via email
 * cache with memcached
 * implement a custom forums system (with threaded comments)

I make no claims that the code is elegant or idiomatic. It is however
real code that's running "in the wild". And I hope it's useful to anyone
else considering doing web development in Haskell.

I welcome and encourage your feedback!