What is the ecosystem for Haskell web development? [closed]

Solution 1:

I have done real production web applications in Haskell. Here is the stack I used:

• PostgreSQL database backend
• HDBC Postgres to connect to it
• XHTML to generate Html. It is a bit of a funny syntax, but at least you have lambda-abstraction.
• Fastcgi to connect the backend to the lighttpd, doing the web serving.

The whole web application is a single haskell program, compiled to native code ghc. I wrote the code to do request routing (and reverse routing) by hand.

Solution 2:

First of all, a disclaimer: I've never done any Haskell web development, so I don't speak from experience.

If you look at the Web category on Hackage, there are lots of web-related packages.

I think most Haskell web application run on a custom server (possibly using Apache's mod_proxy or IIS's Advanced Request Routing as a front end). However, there are also some FastCGI bindings.

The most prominent Haskell webserver/framework/datastorage infrastruction is Happstack, which is interesting for several reasons, the most obvious being that it stores all its state in-memory and doesn't use a relational database.

Another more recent webserver interface is hack, which I don't know much about except that the 1 minute tutorial looks interesting.

There are many more webservers/frameworks in Haskell, but these two are just the ones I know of the top of my head.