You can pretty much use any old approach you'd like with Happstack. I am using it right now and it is very modular. You could conceivably use the Text.HTML mo

You can pretty much use any old approach you'd like with Happstack. I am using it right now and it is very modular. You could conceivably use the Text.HTML module to make your own pages in the functional style. You can use HStringTemplate a la psp and php. Or you can do the fun, bloated and awful web 2.0 thing and write an ass-ton of javascript to do everything in the ajax-y fashion, and just use happstack to serve up json. A similar situation holds for the MACID data store. It looked ok to me, but I wanted to play with some distributed DBs instead (e.g. Mongo and Couch), and it works just fine there too. The important thing is that if you understand how HTTP works, how requests are served up, etc., then you can pretty much hit the ground running with happstack, without having to set up Apache and learn cgi or set up Tomcat and figure out how to get the default permissions on Ubuntu to work. So in that regard, it seems much closer to RoR than the traditional approach.