[web-devel] Type-safe URL handling

[Jeremy Shaw]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 5:17 PM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>wrote:

> Based on everything you've said, and some thought I've had on my own, I
> agree that the base function should involve no typeclasses and not break up
> the path into pieces. Here's a proposal for the entire core:
>
> newtype AbsPath = AbsPath { unAbsPath :: String }
> newtype PathInfo = PathInfo { unPathInfo :: String }
>

Can you provide some simples examples of the types of mistakes we might make
if we didn't use newtypes here?

One potentially nice thing about having the function, showURL :: (url ->
String) instead of (url -> AbsPath) is that it works with most of the html
'templating' solutions with out any extra fusing around. For example, with
Text.Html

 a ! [href (showURL Foo)]

Which is kind of nice.

But I also like using newtypes when it helps avoid problems.


handleWai :: (PathInfo -> Failing url)
>           -> (url -> PathInfo)
>           -> (PathInfo -> AbsPath)
>           -> (url -> (url -> AbsPath) -> Application)
>           -> Application
> handleWai parsePI buildPI buildAbsPath dispatch req = do
>     let pi = PathInfo $ S.unpack $ pathInfo req
>     case parsePI pi of
>         Success url -> dispatch url (buildAbsPath . buildPI) req
>         Failure errors -> return $ Response Status404 [] $ Right $ fromLBS
>                                  $ L.pack $ unlines errors
>

Depends on which 'core' we are talking about. I still intend to use urlt
with happstack, which does not yet have fully integration with Wai. So I
will need:

handleHappstack.. or some variant. And I can imagine other non-Wai people
want to use urlt as well. So I imagine we will have:

urlt-wai
urlt-happstack
etc

so at the real core that would just leave, PathInfo and AbsPath ? Unless we
get rid of them.. then there is nothing at the core, only optional things :p

- jeremy
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/web-devel/attachments/20100319/658b017b/attachment-0001.html