Web

Haskell Web Development Software: Servers - Libraries - Frameworks Deploy - Cloud Interfaces to frameworks Databases and Persistence Testing and Verification Content Management Community & Research: Forums and Discussion Literature (research, talks and blogs) Existing Haskell web applications Ongoing projects and ideas

The web development community in Haskell has recently had a large boost in activity, resulting in a plethora of choices in libraries. As usual, a breadth of options is a double edged sword: you can choose the tools more to your style, but it is harder to find quality tools.

Rather than one framework to rule them all, Haskell provides several options. On this page we show a non-inclusive list of options to help the Haskell web programming newbie find which libraries and frameworks work together.

Please join us on the mailing lists to discuss web development in Haskell.

Option 1: Happstack

Happstack is a complete web framework. It is organized as a suite of libraries including:

• happstack-server: an integrated HTTP server, routing combinators, fileserving, etc
• happstack-data: datatype serialization and migration support
• happstack-state (aka macid): an (optional) powerful NoSQL ACID storage system with native support for Haskell types and replication

It also includes integration with many 3rd party libraries including:

• templating: Blaze HTML combinator library, Hamlet, HSP, HStringTemplate, Heist, and more
• forms: Formlets
• routing: web-routes type-safe urls and routing
• databases: can be used with most Database interfaces with no special support required

Happstack is primarily intended for use on VPS or dedicated hosts, but can be used with CGI via FastCGI or hack.

See the Happstack Home Page for more information and to learn how to get support via IRC and mailing lists.

Option 2: Snap + WAI + Yesod

(NOTE: This option seems to be wishful thinking as Snap does not support WAI AFAIK - JeremyShaw)

WAI and Hack are interfaces between web applications and HTTP servers. In this option, you code the applications that make up your website so that each application implements the WAI interface. So you might have a forum application, a blog application, and a wiki which each implement the WAI interface. Hack is another interface which is simpler to use that WAI but is not quite as powerful. Information about WAI and Hack can be found on Hackage: WAI, Hack.

Yesod is a collection of libraries which help you build applications which implement the WAI interface. This includes things like templating, a data persistence layer, building forms, and so on. A number of reusable web applications that implement the WAI interface can be found on hackage (TODO: insert list)

You would then use the Snap web server to combine together all the different WAI and Hack web applications, plus a library like web-routes-quasi or something similar to route URLs to the various applications.

Option 3: (Fast)CGI + WAI + Yesod

This option is similar to Option 2 except we use a webserver like nginx, lighttpd, or Apache. These servers would communicate with your web applications using CGI or FastCGI. See wai-handler-fastcgi for a library which connects FastCGI with the WAI interface. A search for wai-handler shows the various options available. See the deployment chapter of the Yesod book to see how to configure the various servers and FastCGI to host WAI applications.

Option 4: Turbinado

TODO: Explain about Turbinado since I don't know anything about it right now

Option 5: Salvia

TODO: Explain about Salvia

Option 6: Snap + custom code + libraries

In this option, you would write your website to directly use the Snap server. Instead of using an interface like WAI, you would receive requests and generate responses directly to the snap server. Look through the Snap documentation to get started using this option. There are a plethora of libraries to help you:

• Snap's templating library called Heist, some other templating library or the Blaze HTML combinator library.
• Some database Access or Persistence library.
• The Formlets library for coding forms.
• See Libraries for a list of some other helpful libraries.

Option 7: (Fast)CGI + custom code + libraries

This is very similar to the previous option, but using CGI or FastCGI to talk to another web server. See this tutorial on simple CGI programming for a simple example.

Option 8

Something not listed on this page. There are several web frameworks or libraries in various stages of development like Lemmachine, Haskell on a Horse, mohws, loli, plus probably others which are not listed.