[web-devel] Hoogle Advice

[Jeremy Shaw]

On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think WAI could be increasingly used - its at a level of abstraction
> that I quite like. I certainly have other projects which I will
> probably switch over to WAI/Warp.

I am curious to see how your feelings on this change or stay the same over time.

The basic WAI abstraction is very nice. You essentially supply a
function, Request -> IO Response, that will be used to handle incoming
Requests. It is very straight-forward and obvious what is going on. At
first this is very attractive. It makes it very easy to get started.

But at the same time, it doesn't do much for you.. I wonder if you
will ultimately end up recreating a higher level framework in your WAI
based applications. For example, you might decide that passing the
Request around explicitly is tiresome and stick it in a Reader monad.
When looking up key/value pairs from the query string or post data,
you might want more expressive combinators for validating the values
and converting the string data to haskell types. You might find that
sometimes you need to escape early and return an alternate page. You
might realize that the Response is going to need some extra headers
(like the Cookie field) but be in a spot in your code where the
Response has not been created yet. So you will need a filter, or
something, that can add the header later when the Response is created.
And, of course, you need some way to look at the pieces of the url and
map it to a handler.

These are the types of features (and more) that exist in the
higher-level frameworks like Happstack, Snap, and Yesod. In theory,
that is the value they add over just using WAI. It is likely that, in
the future, happstack will not include it's own http backend, but be a
layer on top of WAI+warp, hyena, or some other low-level WAI-like HTTP
backend. So, I am curious if the value-added features we provide
actual provide value :)  One measure of this will be if you end up
creating similar adhoc functions and structure in your apps.

- jeremy