scotty VS postgres-websockets

Here's the current commit I'm working with: https://github.com/scotty-web/scotty/commit/3ed8586c046b46dc42740e8ac2e7fe712e84191d

If you're not a fan of the ruby-on-rails / swiss army knife approach that IHP takes, check out Scotty. Add Lucid for Html rendering, and Selda for Postgres. (There are other options for any of these tools if you prefer)

- Scotty (simple web routing) https://hackage.haskell.org/package/scotty

I've found htmx and hyperscript talking to scotty to be an easy way to get something like this going while retaining the joys of Haskell on the backend and avoiding the pains of Haskell on the frontend.

Finally, to add my opinion in the context of some other posts: I'd suggest Scotty (and probably other libraries I'm less familiar with) before Servant in particular, as Servant is a lot to absorb if you're also trying to build fluency in Haskell at the same time. Similarly, I'd advocate for Elmish (disclaimer, it's written by (very talented programmers other than myself at) my company) over Halogen, at least based on the last time I tried Halogen--I found it pretty complex as well. Don't get me wrong, I think Servant and Halogen are both great, just...complex.

This is an example of REST API built with Scotty a web framework of Haskell and PostgreSQL a relational database. It's a simple API to manage products.

Not that I'm much of an expert, but if you're talking about a very barebones static single-page-app, then you could very easily get by just using blaze-html to put your elements on the page, and then scotty is a basic web framework you could use to serve up your app.

For small web projects I always used scotty in combination with some html library like blaze for example.

Snap (http://snapframework.com/) and Scotty (https://hackage.haskell.org/package/scotty) are both projects that can fit this description.

PS: If you want DIY things like this, Flask-style, you'd better take Spock, scotty or something like that.

At work, we've finally replaced a large part of a custom (mostly-)web backend with PostgREST recently, and that's quite a relief: considerably less code to maintain in that project now, and that was a rather awkward code. Something akin to PostgREST's "Embedding with Top-level Filtering" [1] had to be provided for all the tables, with OpenAPI schema and a typed API (Haskell + Servant); I avoided manually writing it all down, but at the cost of poking framework internals, and maintainability suffered. It was particularly annoying that the code doesn't really do anything useful, except for standing between a database and an HTTP client, and simply mimics the database anyway. Whenever a change had to be introduced, it was introduced into the database, the backend, and the frontend simultaneously, so it wasn't even useful for some kind of compatibility.

Now PostgREST handles all that, and only a few less trivial endpoints are handled by a custom backend (including streaming, which I'm considering replacing with postgrest-websocket [2] at some point).

During the switch to PostgREST, the encountered minor issues were those with inherited tables (had to set a bunch of computed/virtual columns [3] in order to "embed" those), and with a bug on filtering using such relations (turned out it was an already-fixed regression [4], so an update helped). Also a couple of helper stored procedures (to use via /rpc/) for updates in multiple tables at once (many-to-many relationships, to edit entities along with their relationships, using fewer requests) were added (though the old custom backend didn't have that), the security policies were set from the beginning, the frontend was rewritten (which allowed to finally switch without adding more work), so it was only left to cleanup the backend.

Not using views, since as mentioned above, database changes usually correspond to frontend changes, and the API doesn't have to be that stable yet.

Happy with it so far.

[1] https://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html#embedding-with-top-...

[2] https://github.com/diogob/postgres-websockets

[3] https://postgrest.org/en/stable/api.html#computed-virtual-co...

[4] https://github.com/PostgREST/postgrest/issues/2530