[web-devel] Type-safe URL handling

[Victor Nazarov]

On Thu, Mar 25, 2010 at 6:48 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 3:36 PM, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy at n-heptane.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Mar 22, 2010 at 9:41 PM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> If I'm not mistaken, I think that addresses all the issues on the table;
>>> is there anything left to decide? I look forward to seeing a sample URLT :).
>>
>> There were other issues that came up, but nothing exciting enough to talk
>> about.
>> I have pushed a patch which I think brings the code up to date in terms of
>> functionality. See WaiExample for a detail of everything that is currently
>> supported (aside from the happstack / hsp stuff).
>> The next steps are to:
>>  1. change the names of any functions or types that we do not currently
>> like
>>  2. add the haddock documentation
>>  3. split the package into separate packages so that you don't have to
>> pull in extra dependencies that you aren't going to use
>>  4. turn the WaiExample into a literate tutorial / blog post
>>  5. add a (simple) happstack example as well
>> So take a look and let me know what you think. Especially in regards to
>> #1.
>> Then we can also look into how to extend the yesod mkResources stuff to
>> work with this new code.
>> from a parsing point of view, we almost don't have to do anything, we
>> could just do:
>>  [mkResource|  "/foo/:int/:int" = \i j -> mySite (Foo i j) |]
>> or whatever the syntax is. But that does not solve the issue of how to go
>> from (Foo 1 2) back to /foo/1/2 and ensure that it is the inverse operation.
>>
> I don't have time right now to look at the code, but I will soon (I'm in the
> middle of traveling *again*). Regarding the mkResource issue, I think it's
> slightly more complicated, and what I was thinking of was a combination of
> TemplateHaskell and QuasiQuotes to address it:
> * The quasi-quoted content will follow mostly the same syntax, though
> allowing you to specify the name of the constructor you wish to assign to
> each resource pattern.
> * Since we now will need to have multiple top-level definitions being
> generated, quasi-quoting alone won't solve the issue. So I will have a
> quasi-quote function to convert the YAML syntax to a StringObject, and then
> a TH function to convert the StringObject to:
>   1) A datatype for the URL.
>   2) A pair to to/from functions.
>   3) A dispatch function.
> This is the point at which having WebPlug/HandleT becomes useful.
> If that was too vague, just let me know and I'll clarify ;).

Hello, everybody.

I haven't been following the entire thread. But I think that typed
URLs are great. When I started thinking about typed URLs, I thought
about using only data type definition and dropping quosi-quotation
entirely in favour of template haskell. I wanted to write some
template haskell function to work on data-type declaration, it would
use data-constructors names and arguments and build path components
from their names. So we will need no new notation to describe
application resources, we will never be conserned with URL generator
and parser, we will work with our own, carefully defined data-type as
it IS a URL.

-- 
Victor Nazarov