[Haskell-cafe] Summer of Code idea: Haskell Web Toolkit

[Michael Snoyman]

On Tue, Mar 6, 2012 at 11:40 PM, Alejandro Serrano Mena
<trupill at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I'm really looking forward to helping in the Summer of Code, if Haskell goes
> into it this year (something I take for granted :). I would like to propose
> an idea for a project, and I'm looking for suggestions about whether it's
> good, should be improved or it's just unfeasible.
>
> My idea is to make a client-side Haskell Web Toolkit, in the spirit of
> Google Web Toolkit, which would allow to program in Haskell the client part
> of a web application, and would complement the web frameworks already
> existing for Haskell (such as Yesod and Snap). The point is coming about
> with a Haskell-ish way to program applications, to reuse all the existing
> knowledge for our beloved language.
>
> I've added more details in a pre-proposal in Google Docs, available
> in https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FnTNO9uTobDHRTDXWurKns7vGTjeauw0nRhbtt6vavs/edit
> Tell me if you prefer to see it in other format, but I didn't want to
> generate a bigger e-mail.
>
> Thanks in advance.

I definitely think the idea has merit. In general I'm wary of
solutions which try to compile down to Javascript[1], and I'm not sure
if actually providing a full Haskell-to-JS approach is a good idea.
Another possibility might be a DSL/combinator library for generating
JS. Though at this point, I wouldn't rule out either approach.

Yesod is currently wrapping up its 1.0 release (almost certainly
out-the-door by the end of April), and after that our main focus is
intended to be client-side integration, so we would certainly be happy
to discuss design ideas and collaborate in general.

Michael

[1] I say "compile down to" to mean nontrivial changes, as opposed to
something like Coffeescript, which is a fairly simple conversion.