While hvac, which I announced here recently, is not yet ready for
primetime, so to speak, you may want to take a look at it -- with a
few tweaks it should match your specs. (darcs get http://
community.haskell.org/~sclv/hvac/)
It does include some templating, though you don't have to use it
significantly, but then again, I find it hard to automate data
validation without it (how else do you control showing results?), and
it does allow for session support, although it isn't necessary.
It is, however FastCGI based and has built-in connection pooling. It
should theoretically be able to speak to any database that HDBC
speaks to, although it does need a little work (here's the
modification issue) to ensure the strong atomicity constraints work
properly with anything but sqlite.
Additionally, the validation functionality should be very powerful
and intuitive, and the control flow combinators equally so, which are
also written to parse RESTful parameters as part of url strings as well.
Not sure what you mean by marshalling to-from Haskell types -- the
validation provides one side of it, and on the other, as you well
know, HDBC gives a very convenient way to deal with the SQL end :-)
The less tested/more dicey parts of hvac are all those that deal with
atomicity and caching, and if you're not relying on those, then that
shouldn't be an issue either. And the only questions there, in my
mind at least, are to what degree running everything out of STM (i.e.
optimistically) could lead to problems in high-contention
environments -- so again, possibly not an issue for your needs in any
case.
As for event model -- hvac tries to be nonjudgemental, though it is
request rather than continuations-based and is mainly designed to be
REST. One could implement a "conversations" layer over sessions
without too much work -- alternately, control flow can be parameter
based, much as one would do in plenty of other web frameworks.
Finally, although the atomic stuff is what makes hvac fun, one could
rip out either the controller or validation sections without too much
work and act directly over FastCGI. On its own even, the FastCGI lib
isn't perfect, but as Paul Brown noted, its not too hard to build a
few nice structures on top of it to handle whatever you throw at it.
Regards,
Sterl.
On Mar 27, 2008, at 3:26 PM, John Goerzen wrote:
Hi again,
I'm currently working on a project that has a Web interface to data
stored in a SQL database. I wrote this thing in WASH a few years
back. Overall, this has been acceptable, but the non-Haskell-adepts
around here run away screaming from the code. Not only that, but we
don't get control over the names of the form elements, which can make
interacting with other software that sometimes plonks users down
halfway through the process -- well, interesting. Also, WASH supports
nothing better than CGI, which is a big minus when talking to SQL
databases.
What I really want is some sort of simple tool that supports FastCGI
or some such, has basic support for form data input validation and
marshalling to/from Haskell types, and basic control flow. I don't
need, or really particularly want, something that uses hs-plugins to
compile pages on demand (I'm using Haskell for it's static safety,
after all). Nor do I need fancy templating systems or session support
(we use HTTP auth and are fine with it for now.)
So I've looked around a bit at the landscape. Any recommendations?
I've found these:
HSP: big on "dynamic pages". I don't want to make my webserver able
to compile Haskell code. Develop code, compile, test, make sure it's
right, then push to production every 6 months around here.
WASH: Pretty much the right niche, but the event model is hard to use.
HAppS: Frankly it is a big collection of confusing packages to me.
What
documentation exists doesn't seem to be relevant anymore, and it seems
to be designed to not use a SQL database.
FastCGI: Relies upon CGI for a good part of processing. Does not seem
to have any form data validation support built in.
Thanks again,
-- John
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