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

[Greg Weber]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Alejandro Serrano Mena
<trupill at gmail.com> wrote:
> I agree with you that maybe this proposal is vague for a GSoC, but I don't
> think that websockets is a good option either, because not all browsers
> support them.

We already have a websockets library, but like you say it is not very
useful by itself because it may not be supported in all browsers. The
GSoC proposal is to create a library that will use appropriate
fallbacks on all browsers, which is how websockets are normally used.

>
>
> 2012/3/7 Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info>
>>
>> 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
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>