[web-devel] A separation of concerns

[Johan Tibell]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 5:33 PM, Chris Eidhof <chris at eidhof.nl> wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I don't believe that there could be one big framework for everybody. Some people want good HTML abstractions, others only think of the server as data storage. Some people want RESTful URLs, other people don't care about RESTfulness but would benefit heavily from controller abstractions. For certain applications SQL might be perfect and for others the Happstack-State works great.
>
> My point is: we should not try to build one big framework. Instead, I propose that we build a set of smaller libraries that each do one thing very well. Some of these libraries might be designed to work together.

While I think there is space for frameworks as a way to help
developers structure web applications I agree with the call for
smaller libraries. In fact, one of the best things that happened to
Haskell web development the last few months is in my opinion the
'text' library. Even though it has nothing to do with web development
per se it solves an important problem for web development, namely
having a space efficient, fast and correct data type for Unicode text.
The reason I pick the 'text' library as an example is that I think it
exemplifies the kind of libraries we need more of: well-test,
high-performance, and well-documented libraries.

There are lots of small libraries that are still missing. For example
an equivalent of Python's urllib, a really fast and *simple* HTTP
server, a high-performance and *full features* database library for
working with e.g. MySQL, etc.

Cheers,
Johan