[Haskell-cafe] CGI module almost useless

[Sven Panne]

[ Moving this thread slowly to the libraries list... ]

Bjorn Bringert wrote:
> John Goerzen wrote:
> 
>> My apologies if this sounds like a bit of a rant; I know people put good
>> effort into this, but....
>>
>> The Network.CGI module in fptools (and GHC) is not very useful.  I think
>> that it should be removed or re-tooled.  Here are the main problems with
>> it:
>>
>> 1. It does not permit custom generation of output headers.  Thus the CGI
>> script cannot do things like set cookies, manage HTTP auth, etc.
>>
>> 2. It does not permit generation of anything other than text/html
>> documents.  Many CGI scripts are used to manage other types of
>> documents.  Notably this makes it incompatible with serving up even
>> basic things like stylesheets and JPEGs.
>>
>> 3. It does not permit the use of any custom design to serve up HTML,
>> forcing *everything* to go through Text.Html.  This makes it impossible
>> to do things like serving up HTML files from disk.
>>
>> 4. There is documentation in the code, but it is as comments only, and
>> doesn't show up in the Haddock-generated GHC library reference.  (Should
>> be an easy fix)
>>
>> 5. It does not appear to support file uploads in any sane fashion
>>
>> Is there a better CGI module out there somewhere that I'm missing, or
>> should I just set about writing my own?
> 
> 
> I wrote this module (based on the Network.CGI code) a while ago:
> 
> http://www.dtek.chalmers.se/~d00bring/darcs/blob/lib/Network/SimpleCGI.hs
> 
> I don't remember what it does really, but I think it solves issues 1,2,3 
> and some of 4.

Although (among other people) I did some hacking in this module in the remote
past, I don't have the time and energy to maintain and/or extend this module
anymore. It would be really great if somebody more actively working in this
area could take the spec lead here and push the development via discussions
here on this library list. John? Björn? A few general design thoughts:

  * To keep people's mind sane, backwards compatibility with the existing
    Network.CGI would be a very worthy goal.

  * Don't use any Haskell language extension available. :-) Currently the
    module can be used e.g. by Hugs in H98 mode, and keeping it that way
    would again be something very desirable.

Cheers,
    S.