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That's pretty awesome, sounds ideal for a RESTful API. In Scala I've noticed a tendency toward using NoSQL storage engines like MongoDB, which speaks a form of

That's pretty awesome, sounds ideal for a RESTful API. In Scala I've noticed a tendency toward using NoSQL storage engines like MongoDB, which speaks a form of native JSON (i.e. it removes the BP required to marshall to/from JSON). A few months ago I took a stroll through available Haskell libraries for web dev., found Yesod, HaskellDB, and a couple of other glue items. What's the state of the art on the web framework front in Haskell? Snap looks interesting but incomplete, and HaskellDB is fairly ancient (LINQ-to-SQL lib would probably get me very interested in Haskell sooner rather than later). Assume email, PDF generation and other web must-haves exist in Haskell ecosystem.

Peaker 13y ago
I do a lot of Haskell development, but virtually nil web development. I know the Yesod ecosystem is well-developed and should have good solutions for most problems. I think the downside of Yesod is that it is not as principled/based-on-sound-theory as most of the Haskell ecosystem is, so it gets a lot of negative sentiment. But it solves a real problem now -- at least until a principled approach is proven. Yesod also has "persistent", which can persist over SQL and IIUC, nosql DB's as well. Snap is more minimalist, and solves a smaller part of the problem for you -- but is much simpler (and perhaps more elegant) than Yesod. Happstack is another web framework, like Yesod (all 3 are under active development). Its main problem (perhaps this was fixed already) was prevalent use of "lazy I/O" which is very controversial. I personally despise lazy I/O and think it violates the basic principles that make Haskell great. I heard something about Happstack immigrating to an alternative to lazy I/O though. Email is a solved problem in the Haskell ecosystem, as far as I can tell. PDF libraries exist: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/#cat:PDF http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/#cat:PDF but I haven't used them, so I don't know how good they are. I don't know about other must-haves. I know an automatic "admin webpage" didn't exist until recently even in the Yesod ecosystem. A friend who encountered this missing piece contributed one, but it was pretty barebones/preliminary. This was a couple years ago though.
- virtualwhys 13y ago
  Thanks for the overview, midway through Learn You a Haskell and it's clear I need to sit down and write some code as reading about Haskell is entirely different than reading about Java, Scala, etc. ;-) In other words, a simple web project is in order. Snap looks like a good call, along with Yesod's Persistent. PDF, email, etc. can come later, just trying to explore the language. Thanks again.

Peaker 13y ago

I do a lot of Haskell development, but virtually nil web development. I know the Yesod ecosystem is well-developed and should have good solutions for most problems. I think the downside of Yesod is that it is not as principled/based-on-sound-theory as most of the Haskell ecosystem is, so it gets a lot of negative sentiment. But it solves a real problem now -- at least until a principled approach is proven. Yesod also has "persistent", which can persist over SQL and IIUC, nosql DB's as well. Snap is more minimalist, and solves a smaller part of the problem for you -- but is much simpler (and perhaps more elegant) than Yesod. Happstack is another web framework, like Yesod (all 3 are under active development). Its main problem (perhaps this was fixed already) was prevalent use of "lazy I/O" which is very controversial. I personally despise lazy I/O and think it violates the basic principles that make Haskell great. I heard something about Happstack immigrating to an alternative to lazy I/O though. Email is a solved problem in the Haskell ecosystem, as far as I can tell. PDF libraries exist: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/#cat:PDF http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/#cat:PDF but I haven't used them, so I don't know how good they are. I don't know about other must-haves. I know an automatic "admin webpage" didn't exist until recently even in the Yesod ecosystem. A friend who encountered this missing piece contributed one, but it was pretty barebones/preliminary. This was a couple years ago though.

virtualwhys 13y ago
Thanks for the overview, midway through Learn You a Haskell and it's clear I need to sit down and write some code as reading about Haskell is entirely different than reading about Java, Scala, etc. ;-) In other words, a simple web project is in order. Snap looks like a good call, along with Yesod's Persistent. PDF, email, etc. can come later, just trying to explore the language. Thanks again.