[Haskell-cafe] JavaScript in a browser as a Windows GUI?

Andrew Coppin andrewcoppin at btinternet.com
Wed Oct 20 17:10:50 EDT 2010


  On 20/10/2010 09:48 PM, Anton van Straaten wrote:
> It's pretty easy to get the basics going.  There are a bunch of 
> options.  Start here:
>
> http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Web
>
> For what you're asking about, I'd suggest looking at the following 
> options from that page.  All of these options involve linking a web 
> server library into your Haskell app, so it's self-contained and all 
> you need is a browser to talk to it:
>
> #6: Snap + custom code: Snap is simple to get started with, and is 
> good if you know exactly what HTML/Javascript you need to generate and 
> don't mind doing it more or less manually.  If you're looking for 
> richer library support for developing HTML UIs, consider the next option.
>
> #2: Snap + Yesod: Yesod will give you many of the framework features 
> you might want for developing web UIs.  (Not sure about JavaFX though.)
>
> #1: Happstack: an ambitious web server / framework with some fancy 
> features like its own data persistence system.
>
> One other tool worth considering if you're doing a lot of Javascript 
> with Haskell is JMacro: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Jmacro
>
> It lets you embed Javascript code directly in Haskell, and easily 
> embed Haskell data into that code.

I'd like to have a go at writing CGI in Haskell. However, I don't really 
want to install and configure the likes of Apache just to quickly test a 
simple CGI script. I was hoping that I could find a trivial little HTTP 
server on Hackage somewhere that would be just a simple binary that I 
can execute and feed CGI binaries to. But alas, the closest thing I can 
find is

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/hws

Alas, this does not work on Windows since it depends on the "unix" 
package. (In fact, almost every network-related package on Hackage 
depends on "unix", for reasons beyond my powers of comprehension...)

(I also looked at non-Haskell lightweight web servers, but they all 
unanimously don't support CGI at all, or only support CGI _scripts_, but 
arbitrary executables...)

Does anybody know of a solution that works on Windows?



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