Right now we are use Haskell to pregenerate HTML/Javascript on Shop.com
We would love to use it for dynamic page generation, it does not
appear to meet our needs:
* NT is not a reliable server platform so we can't use HaskellCOM
* Haskell itself has no libs for database,network,files,ldap
* Haskell has no clean way to maintain a keep-alive connection w/ an httpd
A straightforward solution to the lib problem would be to give Haskell
the ability to use Java libs. These libs have clean well define APIs that
are easy to represent in Haskell. The difficulty is that:
a. a haskell native interface is not well defined and implemented on
hugs&ghc (though this is supposed to change RSN)
b. the Java native call interface is a pain
(it only recently became stable/usable)
c. the build tools don't yet automatically generate Haskell modules for
Java classes/packages
All of these are solvable, but they are not yet solved.
Claus Reinke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> had been working on this but only in
his spare time and is not making a lot of progress. We were thinking
about taking a shot, but there is only so much time in the day.
The third problem is also an implementation issue....
You don't want to have to start a hugs process that makes a
connection to a database everytime a user makes a request. You want
something like mod_perl or jserv which keeps the interpreter
alive to handle requests from the httpd. The other alternative is to
compile GHC code into apache modules, but then you are back to the issue
of having a standard native call interface to Haskell.
(What would be really nice here is a Haskell servlet API which defines a
datatype or class that a haskel servlet runner would take care of).
I would dearly love to be doing the server code in Haskell rather than
Perl or Java, but it isn't there yet for us.
-Alex-
___________________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson Shop.Com
1-212-697-0184 voice The Easiest Way To Shop
