[web-devel] lazy RESTful Content

[Michael Snoyman]

Without knowing all the inner workings, it sounds like this is a good
case to move the JSON response to a separate resource.

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 11:50 PM, Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info> wrote:
> Thanks for the detailed response. My application essentially has permalink
> routes that end up rendering the same html as a non-permalink route, but the
> permalink route does indicate some existing state. Right now it is coded so
> the permalink route will grab the extra state over a separate JSON request.
> The problem being that the original html request also gathered the JSON. I
> suppose my current setup is not truly RESTful and the html response should
> render the state instead of using an extra JSON call, although I do find
> this a convenient technique. One way or another I should be able to change
> things to avoid the extra IO.
>
> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 1:20 PM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 5:29 AM, Greg Weber <greg at gregweber.info> wrote:
>> > lazy and REST seem to go together :)
>> > Perhaps this will expose my ignorance of laziness/strictness and isn't
>> > at
>> > all Yesod specific. I have a handler that can serve html or json. When
>> > an
>> > html request comes in it still executes the json code. I assume this is
>> > because the json code uses liftIO. What is the strategy for avoiding
>> > executing the json code?
>>
>> Let me start with the theoretical response: if you have both an HTML
>> and JSON representation for a resource, they should be giving
>> *exactly* the same data, just in a different format. Therefore, there
>> should just be a pure function applied to some data to generate the
>> JSON version, and thus no extra processing should be performed (due to
>> laziness) when giving an HTML response. Therefore, your problem
>> doesn't exist ;).
>>
>> Of course, in theory, theory and practice are the same, but in
>> practice they're not. Sometimes it *is* necessary to provide slightly
>> different data, and producing that data will require some IO action.
>> There are a few approaches:
>>
>> * What you have right now: run actions for both the HTML and JSON
>> versions, and let Yesod pick the correct result afterward. This is
>> slightly inefficient, but easy to program.
>> * Provide two different resources, one providing only HTML, the other
>> only JSON. Depending on how different your representations are, this
>> might make sense.
>> * If the actions can be run inside the IO monad and don't require a
>> full Handler monad, there is some tricky stuff you can do involving
>> enumerators. This is not often necessary.
>>
>> In theory this is an area where Yesod could provide a nicer interface
>> for users. In practice, the problem doesn't come up very often, and
>> therefore I don't have enough experience to know what a good interface
>> would be. I'd like to hear (even in private) a more detailed
>> explanation of what you're trying to accomplish here.
>>
>> Michael
>
>