[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] ANN: Portackage - a hackage portal

[Andrew Seniuk]

Hi Derek,

Thanks for your comments. Yes, I am probably going to focus on making
it work as a web service and stay away from platform-specific mobile
apps. Not been thinking mobile much at all, since the quantities of
data are taxing even to my laptop, and also I'm inclined to believe
people are mostly at a laptop or desktop when coding Haskell.

However, I'm planning to try server-side sorting and filtering, and
compare performance. No DB is used on the server yet, but it would be
simple enough I suppose -- all this is quite new territory for me.
Also my shared hosting resource limits may become a problem if this
gets a lot of use.

On the other hand, was planning to use persistence (cookies i guess?)
to save the data on the client, so that patches based on Hackage RSS
could be applied incrementally. Also, I think the sorting could be
faster by sending per-column lists of indices. But maybe it is just
the browser rendering which is taking all the time?

I'll take this opportunity to announce a few improvements:
 - shift-click a row to see the Hackage page (bare click does nothing)
 - per-column filtering widgets

Presently working on getting the "last updated" column, this
information is not in a .cabal file but I'm hoping it is in the TAR
metadata...

The link again:  http://www.fremissant.net/portackage

A.