[web-devel] Re: ANNOUNCE: yesod 0.2.0

[Gour]

On Mon, 24 May 2010 17:47:53 +0300
>>>>>> "Michael" == <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:

Michael> I would say that Yesod and Snap are very orthogonal
Michael> projects. Without offense to the Snap authors, I don't really
Michael> think Snap is a framework; it's much more low-level than
Michael> that. As they put it, it's at the level of a Java servlet
Michael> container. In that sense, it's slightly higher-level than
Michael> WAI, but far more low-level than Yesod (or turbinado,
Michael> happstack, etc).

I'd agree with that, but they say: "Higher-level facilities for
building web applications (like user/session management, component
interfaces, data modeling, etc.) are planned but not yet
implemented..." and, moreover, they aim at: "Snap aims to be the de
facto web toolkit for Haskell...  ", so it looks that present release
is not the end of the story.

Michael> I did some work after the Snap release to actually get Yesod
Michael> running on top of Snap. Gregory has been very helpful, and
Michael> will hopefully be releasing a newer version of snap-server
Michael> that provides the functionality I'm missing. (Basically, Snap
Michael> processes url-encoded form data, while WAI specifies that the
Michael> POST body be passed to the application.)

Would it be better option for shared-hosting scenario and FCGI
serving?

Michael> * Yesod uses the WAI definition of enumerator while Snap uses
Michael> the iteratee package. The former is much simpler, the latter
Michael> more powerful. I'd be very interested in a performance
Michael> comparison of the two, my instinct tells me the former wins.

I haven't been able to grok either of them...all I can say is that I
understand this is hot topic in Haskell, and if one wants to dive into
web development with Haskell, there is need to understand them more
(hopefully not fully).

Michael> * Snap has Heist, which is an XML based templating system,
Michael> while Yesod uses Hamlet. However, neither framework is
Michael> actually tied down to these templating systems. In fact, Snap
Michael> doesn't even depend on Heist.

Hamlet looks cool to me...

/me does not like XML stuff...

Michael> * Yesod has type-safe URLs, I don't believe Snap has any
Michael> similar feature. 

Hmm, this is an important issue and one of the selling tickets to use
Haskell instead of e.g. Python/Django (which we recently abandoned).

Michael> * Some design decisions, notably they use a mutable states for
Michael> modifying request and response values while Yesod uses a
Michael> Reader for the request, and writer for response headers and
Michael> actually returns a value for the response body/content type.

What are some of the implications of the above design difference?

Michael> I'm sure there are many more differences, but the main point
Michael> is this: these two projects are very different types of
Michael> frameworks. And I hope and expect that the two projects will
Michael> have some cross-polinization going forward (in fact, we
Michael> already have).

Thank you for the input. It looks that it would be nice to make
another comparison when (hopefully) Snap gets some more higher-level
stuff and when Yesod will have some solution for persistence
(hopefully with the ability to use RDBMS).


Sincerely,
Gour

-- 

Gour  | Hlapicina, Croatia  | GPG key: F96FF5F6
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