[web-devel] Where do you start?

[Artyom Shalkhakov]

Hello,

I'd like to share some links, gathered with much help from other mailing list
subscribers.

There seem to be plenty of ways to get the job done for a Haskell web developer,
aside from using more common languages. :)

First, the do-it-yourself way. There are CGI/FCGI [1], [2] bindings,
so you can use
your binaries with almost any webserver. A very nice templating engine
[3] is also
available. If you wish to embed (X)HTML in Haskell, you can use either
the combinator libraries [4], [5] or [6] (which is highly
experimental). Low-level
libraries like [7],[8] can be used for database connectivity, while
[9] is for those
who would like to construct their queries using combinators. You can also take
a look at lightweight frameworks like [10], [11].  Finally, in the
near future we'll
hopefully have a very robust and high-performance HTTP web-server [12] which
is going to be very simple to start with.

And about the frameworks out there. There are a few all-in-one frameworks
([13], [14]) available for those who can dive into the code, because
their documentation
is quite lacking. (Of course, you can help out the authors by proposing some!)
If you're interested in HAppS, there is a tutorial to help you [15], and you can
take [16] as a reference.

I'm very grateful to all the people who responded to my inquiry!

Regards,
Artyom.

[1] CGI, <http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/cgi>
[2] FCGI, <http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/fastcgi>
[3] HStringTemplate,
<http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/HStringTemplate>
[4] Text.Html, a combinator library
<http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/html>
[5] Text.Xhtml, a combinator library
<http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/xhtml>
[6] VXML <git://mawercer.de/vxml>
[7] Takusen <http://darcs.haskell.org/takusen/>
[8] HDBC <http://software.complete.org/software/projects/show/hdbc>
[9] HaskellDB <http://haskelldb.sourceforge.net/>
[10] HVAC (Haskell View and Controller)
<http://community.haskell.org/~sclv/hvac/>
[11] Kibro <http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/kibro>
[12] Hyena: <http://github.com/tibbe/hyena/tree/master>,
<http://www.galois.com/blog/2008/09/12/left-fold-enumerators-a-safe-expressive-and-efficient-io-interface-for-haskell/>
[13] HAppS, the Haskell Application Server <http://happs.com/>
[14] Turbinado, an early stab at Ruby On Rails <http://turbinado.org/>
[15] Real World HAppS: The Cabalized, self-demoing HAppS Tutorial
<http://happstutorial.com/>
[16] Gitit, a wiki written using HAppS and git
<http://github.com/jgm/gitit/tree/master/>