[Haskell] Publication of InputYourData.com + Project Announcement

[Gwern Branwen]

2008/10/26 Enzo Haussecker <ehaussecker at gmail.com>:
> I would like to announce the publication of InputYourData.com (beta) － the
> online resource tool for financial, mathematical and scientific
> calculations. All web applications found at http://inputyourdata.com/ are
> written solely in Haskell and based on the Network.CGI framework.
> This website began as an experiment to familiarize myself with the monadic
> features of Haskell and their use in web programming. Namely, the mapping
> and manipulation of user inputs as typed objects. Through these experiments
> I found that Haskell allows for an efficient system where a variety of
> operations can be preformed while minimizing as many resources (such as time
> and memory space) as possible.
> I am now interested in developing a similar type of website, except wiki
> style － where all web applications are created by the user. Essentially, I
> am designing a web application where users can symbolically declare the
> arguments of a function and that function's call based on arbitrary
> variables. For example, say a user would like to create a web application to
> compute the roots of a second degree polynomial. He/she would simply declare
> the arguments to her function － three complex numbers a b and c, and the
> call of that function － (-b ± sqrt (b^2 - 4*a*c))/(2*a). The product of that
> users inputs will render a web application that looks similar
> to http://inputyourdata.com/cgi-bin/quadratic.cgi (all text is to be updated
> by the user as well). As one could imagine, other, more complex functions
> invo lving vectors, matrices, stock prices, and other arguments can also be
> defined in terms of arbitrary variables and declared as an inputs to my
> wiki-style web application.

That sounds interesting, certainly. But out of curiosity, how would
you handle the security aspect? It sounds like the utility of such a
wiki lies in letting the user use the full power of Haskell for
development & configuration (which has worked out well for XMonad) -
but obviously that implies letting random users run arbitrary code on
your host. Are you going to just sandbox the web server in a chroot or
something?

> If you are intrigued by this project and you have substantial experience in
> designing Haskell-based web applications, please send me your resume and a
> brief summery of why you are interested.
> Regards,
> Enzo Haussecker

--
gwern