[Haskell-cafe] Re: Two Google Summer of Code project proposals

[Johan Tibell]

I'm not able to log in to Trac to update these proposals at the moment
so I'll add some notes here for now.

On 3/15/10, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
>   A high-performance HTML combinator library using Data.Text
>
> http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1580
>
>   Being both fast and safe, Haskell would make a great
>   replacement for e.g. Python and Ruby for server
>   applications. However, good library support for web
>   applications is sorely missing. To write web applications you
>   need at least three components: a web application server, a
>   data storage layer, and an HTML generation library. The goal of
>   this project is to address the last of the three, as the two
>   are already getting some attention from other Haskell
>   developers.

Several students have expressed interest in working on this project
and several people hacked on a possible implementation of such a
library, BlazeHtml, during ZuriHac. (I'm not sure what the current
status of BlazeHtml is, I'm sure some of the people hacking on it can
fill me in.)

Getting character encodings and other tricky parts of the HTML
standard right is tricky and so is creating a high-performance library
with a good API. I encourage any students who wish to apply for this
project (or any other Summer of Code project for that matter) to show
that you understand the problem by submitting a design draft together
with your SoC application. A design draft could for example contain
the important parts of the API and some notes on tricky issues and how
you plan to deal with them.

For an example of a tricky issue read up on the interaction between
Unicode and HTML

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_and_HTML

Cheers,

Johan