[Haskell-cafe] Re: Haskell web development entries on the Wiki

[Christopher Done]

On 6 October 2010 16:33, Henning Thielemann
<lemming at henning-thielemann.de> wrote:
> How about mailing to the package maintainers in order to inform they, that
> the Web application list on the Wiki has changed? I'm afraid not all authors
> follow haskell-cafe or haskell-web.

I could send out a bulk mail requesting authors to have a look and
help out improve this part of the wiki.

> httpd-shed seems to be missing in Servers. I also like to see HWS mentioned
> in Servers as it is the ancestor of some Haskell Web Server projects
> (WASH-wsp, MoHWS, and what was the name of the CGI thing?). For me the Wiki
> is not only a place that describes cutting edge software but also a place to
> help understand how things evolved. HWS is still interesting, because its
> quite basic, so it's still a good start if you like to program your own
> server. It is not necessary to be maintained in order to be interesting.

I hadn't heard of httpd-shed. Will you add it to Servers? I think a
page about HWS would also be good that shows the history of it and
derived projects, if you feel like writing it!

I also agree that even the simple examples like HWS are interesting,
like CGI; I cleaned up the old CGI article:
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Practical_web_programming_in_Haskell
I condensed it visually, and updated links to be more within the wiki
and separated, e.g. this page
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Web/Literature/Static_linking
because it's useful as a general idea and not focused on CGI
specifically. It's definitely not my intention to discard useful
information, just to make it more accessible and remove misleading
data.

Regarding the active/inactive, I think it's a good idea to separate
what we know to be actively maintaned -- i.e.,

* what people are using,
* what still has someone maintaining it,
* what actually still *compiles*.

Here's my reasoning, there are three uses of listing frameworks on the wiki:

1) People looking to survey what's currently available and stable --
i.e. what's alive?
2) People looking to try out Haskell web programming, who want
something that they know will have some support and be current,
therefore easy.
3) People who are serious about web development and want to survey the
whole existing landscape.

(1) and (2) don't care or want to have to sift through or waste time
on libraries that don't work, or might not work. (3) has the
motivation to sift through everything and they want to see the history
of everything too. These people too will want to know what's current
and working, I think.

In this sense I think we are optimising access to the information.

What do you think?