[web-devel] Hoogle Advice

[Bardur Arantsson]

On 2011-01-25 09:49, Michael Snoyman wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 25, 2011 at 9:33 AM, Bardur Arantsson<spam at scientician.net>  wrote:
>> On 2011-01-25 02:14, Jeremy Shaw wrote:
>>>
>>> On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 4:38 PM, Neil Mitchell<ndmitchell at gmail.com>
>>>   wrote:
>> [--snip--]
>> The thing I'd like to see is really more *framework-independent* code for
>> things like session handling, cookie handling, etc. I really like the 'http'
>> package for this reason. It does exactly one thing and (mostly) doesn't get
>> in the way of whatever else you're trying to do.
>>
>> Maybe some of this 'generic' stuff could be put in WAI middleware -- then at
>> least Neil and I could share that code :).
>
> I've been making a big push to get framework-agnostic code separated
> out into separate packages wherever possible. For your case you may
> want to look at the cookie and clientsession packages. Additionally,
> you may want to consider using blaze-html for the HTML generation, or
> even Hamlet.

I've already settled on blaze-html... a lot less fidgeting with string 
concatenation, etc. plus it seems to perform extremely well.

Hamlet isn't really useful for my purposes -- I really want *ALL* the 
client-side HTML/JS/etc. to be generated by widgets/components and my 
framework users shouldn't write any HTML directly. This HTML will also 
be injected into the page dynamically as the user interacts with the UI, 
so blaze-html is great.

>
> I'd be interested in hearing more about how you are planning on
> implementing this framework.

 > Yesod already provides built-in support
> for widgets, though so far I have been very conservative about
> including direct Ajax features. For the most part, it is used for
> providing form controls that do validation. However, there's no reason
> it *couldn't* be used for Ajax.
>

I've actually implemented a little demo app in Yesod and have looked a 
little at the widget type/module, but as far as I can tell they don't go 
anywhere close to where I want to go. I don't have an actual design doc 
anywhere at the moment, so the only thing I can use to illustrate what I 
want to do is by way of pointing to Vaadin. You basically program as if 
you were programming an old-school graphical UI (Swing, SWT, GTK+, Tk, 
whatever) and the framework takes care of "translating" that to a 
browser application. Essentially the user should not have to write *ANY* 
html, JavaScript or CSS at all.

All the state transfer will happen through callbacks to the server 
and/or Comet-style push updates to the browser. I'm still investigating 
reasonable ways to implement proper state handling.

> Following my normal sets of advice, I would recommend that any
> component that you build that is not intrinsically tied to your
> framework be released as a separate package so we can all benefit and
> share resources where relevant. And if you have questions/requests on
> the WAI side, just let me know.
>

Sure.

One thing I am looking for is a convenient way to autogenerate 
JavaScript. I could use the "blaze" string builders (or builders for 
Text or whatever), but if there is some library for building JS in a 
safer way than just string concatenation. As with the HTML, I'm also 
going to be generating this JS extremely dynamically. I know about 
Julius, but what I (think) I really need is a sort of AST datatype for 
JavaScript with a toText/toBS printer.

Cheers,