yesod-persistent VS ihp

I also looked into Snap (http://snapframework.com/) and Yesod (https://www.yesodweb.com/) for Haskell. I didn't really get anywhere with those though because I had build issues with dependencies and was in a bit of a hurry so I put them off for later.

If you have a yesod app and want to try this out, I've got a cabal.project that works for yesod and persistent: https://github.com/yesodweb/yesod/pull/1769

It would be an unorthodox choice. If you're looking to use this personal site as a portfolio project, you'd probably be better off using something like Node (JS), Java, or Python which tend to be a bit more marketable. However, if you want to try learning Haskell, then building a personal site with it seems like a great way to dive in. If you want to learn a bit more, Yesod seems to be the most well-documented Haskell web framework

I believe yesod is the go-to all encompassing framework.

frameworks like yesod and IHP

In this blog post I’m presenting an implementation of a Wiki System in the spirit of the legendary C2-Wiki - written in Haskell with the Yesod framework.

I'm wondering if this is related to this.

> Every language phasing the web is stringly typed

Heh, not even close. Off the top of my head I can think of Ur/Web as an extreme example ( http://www.impredicative.com/ur ), and slightly more mainstream systems like Yesod ( https://www.yesodweb.com ). I've worked professionally with Haskell, although not for Web stuff. These days I mostly work with Scala, which has a similar typing mindset to ML/Haskell, but unfortunately inherits a lot of stringly typed legacy from Java. We use an in-house library that provides zero-cost newtypes to distinguish between different semantically-distinct data types, many of which just-so-happen to be representable as subsets of String (e.g. GET parameter names, GET parameter values, POST bodies, etc.). This makes it a type error to try and e.g. concatenate different sorts of data together.

W.r.t. "escaping", I tend to avoid it entirely since it's inherently unsafe:

- "Escaping" doesn't distinguish between its input and output types; they're both just "String", and we have to make assumptions about the contents of each (i.e. it's unsafe)

- Having the same input and output types makes it possible to "double-escape" by accident. This discourages the use of escaping, just-in-case it happens to be done elsewhere; hence it's very common to end up without any escaping taking place.

- Having the same input and output types makes escaping functionally unnecessary: anything we do to an escaped string could also be done to an unescaped string, so it's up to us to remember that it's needed (i.e. it's unsafe).

The whole idea of "escaping a string" betrays a flawed approach to the problem. Instead of throwing everything into the same representation, then manually trying to figure out whether or not a value comes from a particular subset of that representation or not, it's much easier and safer to avoid lumping them all together in the first place. If our inputs have a certain type (e.g. HTTP.Get.Val) and we can only output certain other types (e.g. JSON, Map[HTTP.Header.Key, HTTP.Header.Val], etc.), then the processing which turns input into output is forced to specify any necessary conversions. Whilst such conversions may involve escape sequences, having them associated to particular types is more akin to serialisation.

Heck, at my first PHP job we largely solved this problem not by 'filtering and escaping', but by modifying the PHP interpreter to distinguish between 'clean' and 'dirty' strings (with literals being clean, and $_GET, etc. being dirty). Operations like concatenation would propagate 'dirtiness', and output functions like 'echo' would crash if given a dirty string. Traditional 'escaping' functions would convert dirty strings to clean ones, and crash when given a clean string. Having this be dynamic was more annoying than ahead-of-time compile errors, but it still did a pretty good job.

There's pretty much no excuse for stringly typed languages/libraries/etc. when such such trivial solutions exist, other than the historical inertia of legacy systems.

The project is going to make use of Warp. To smoothen the development process I set up yesod-bin according to their template for non-yesod projects. This worked fine initially, giving me hot reloading on file changes, but after adding the private package as described above it's giving the following error:

I found IHP straightforward:

https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/

despite not remembering much haskell!

This assumes you can get past nix for the install.

I find IHP well-designed. I just wish the licensing scheme were more transparent.

You can find the docs at https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/ and some getting started videos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLl9Sjq6Nzc&list=PLenFm8BWuKlS0IaE31DmKB_PbkMLmwWmG

In case this got you interested in Haskell, and you want a good way to start your Haskell journey (and have something to apply the optimization handbook to), check out IHP. It's the Rails/Laravel of the Haskell world. You can start here https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/Guide/index.html or check it out on GitHub here https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp

At IHP we've been using Algora for a while now and it works really great. Here's e.g. one PR that was merged last week with a bounty attached https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/issues/1621 Everything was set up in less than 15 minutes and ioannis and zafer have been super helpful with any questions we had.

In general I think this is a good direction and an interesting take on the open question around sustainable open source. Congrats on the launch and keep up the great work! :)

You could contribute to IHP! We have some great docs to get started here https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md And we have some low hanging fruits in GitHub issues for you to get started with, e.g. https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/issues/1601 (also there's always lots of activity in the IHP Slack, in case you have any questions/need help)