[Haskell-cafe] Subject: A universal data store interface

[Greg Weber]

>> This proposal is vague and we would need to work with you to narrow
>> things down a bit.
>
> Yes, that would be cool :-) Since I'm not familiar with Persistence at
> all (unfortunately :-( ), do you have some suggestions for me to start
> with?
>
> I've found this http://www.yesodweb.com/book/persistent and I'm going
> to get familiar with it in the first place.  I hope it won't take me
> much longer than a couple days.

That is definitely the best place to start. If you want to look at
more example usage code you can look at the test suite in the
persistent-test folder of the repository.
Perhaps you have a Haskell program that could benefit from persisting
data (and maybe already does in a flat file) and you could try
integrating Persistent with it.

> I am rather far away from Web programming, so, unfortunately, I am not
> sure whether it would be relevant if I volunteered to contribute to
> Yesod directly.  In my perspective, there are possibilities for a
> non-Web programmer to contribute to Yesod, though, so, if I am not too
> much off with my perspectives, I'll be glad to work on Yesod as well.

I also opened up a GSoC ticket for making Haskell ready for the
"real-time" web. This is also another somewhat self-contained project
that does not really require web development experience. More and more
programs would like to have a web interface or at least speak some
HTTP at some point. Most web programmers don't have a great
understanding of the internals of web development that they are
abstracted from. I wouldn't shy away from something web related
because you are afraid you won't be able to hack it. The only problem
would be that you might not be able to judge the project well before
starting the project.