I recently gave a talk at BayHac about some of the things I've learned in building production Reflex applications. If you're interested, you can find it here:
video slides github
Recently there has been a lot of discussion and questions about the differences between the big three Haskell web frameworks: Happstack, Yesod, and Snap. Different pieces of the answer have been discussed in a number of places. In this post, I'd like to try to give a more complete comparison. Hopefully it will be relatively unbiased, but without being so watered down that it is useless. I've succeeded if you can't tell which framework I'm a major contributor to based solely on the text of this post. Happstack First, up is Happstack , the oldest of the three with original commit history as early as February, 2005. Happstack used to be called HAppS . It was primarily composed of a web server based on lazy IO, a fairly radical (for the time) in-memory persistence approach for storing and versioning native Haskell data types, and a library called IxSet for making it easier to use this state system with relational data access patterns. I've heard a number of pe...
For the past few months I've been working on a project with a fairly complex interactive web interface. This required me to venture into the wild and unpredictable jungle of Javascript development. I was totally unprepared for what I would find. Soon after starting the project it became clear that just using JQuery would not be sufficient for my project. I needed a higher level Javascript framework. After a doing a little research I settled on Ember.js. The Zombie Code Apocalypse Ember was definitely a big improvement over straight JQuery, and allowed me to get some fairly complex UI behavior working very quickly. But recently I've run into some problems. The other day I had a UI widget defined like this: App.FooController = Ember.ObjectController.extend({ // ... }); App.FooView = Ember.View.extend({ // ... }); It was used somewhere on the page, but at some point I decided that the widget was no longer needed, so I commented out the widget's mar...
DEC 2020 UPDATE: A lot has changed since this post was written. Much of "cabal hell" is now a thing of the past due to cabal's more recent purely functional "nix style" build infrastructure. Some of the points here aren't really applicable any more, but many still are. I'm updating this post with strikethroughs for the points that are outdated. I posted this as a reddit comment and it was really well received, so I thought I'd post it here so it would be more linkable. A lot of people complain about "cabal hell" and ask what they can do to solve it. There are definitely things about the cabal/hackage ecosystem that can be improved, but on the whole it serves me quite well. I think a significant amount of the difficulty is a result of how fast things move in the Haskell community and how much more reusable Haskell is than other languages. With that preface, here are my best practices that seem to make Cabal work pretty well for me in...
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