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

[Greg Weber]

This is obviously a great concept. However, it may not be appropriate
for a GSoC. The design space is far too open, and it is not clear if
anything in that space will end up beating plain old javascript.

I think my proposal for an awesome websockets library [1] shows that
this is putting the cart before the horse. For some of the potential
javascript solutions, websockets is a dependency anyways. Without
being able to hold open a connection to the server, required server
interaction will be too slow.
Yesod has been successful by explicitly avoiding any new radical
paradigms, but by instead just trying to get the basics of web
development established correctly. Without websockets, we don't have
the basics down for fluid client-side interaction.
The groundwork for this ticket has been laid: it should be easy to
accomplish with time left over.
So we are guaranteed a clear win for the community. With the time left
over, a solution to the javascript problem can be attempted. But there
is no burden for it to be solved within the summer. Next year the
landscape will be more mature and we can try to come up with a solid
proposal for the javscript problem if the community hasn't already
created a solution.

[1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/summer-of-code/ticket/1607