Web/Frameworks

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Below is a list of known to be active Haskell web frameworks. Rather than one framework to rule them all, Haskell provides several options. You can view the Web/Deploy page to get an idea of how you might deploy an application written in some of these frameworks.

See also: there are also many inactive web frameworks to draw inspiration from

Happstack

Happstack is a Haskell web framework. Happstack is designed so that developers can prototype quickly, deploy painlessly, scale massively, operate reliably, and change easily. It supports GNU/Linux, OS X, FreeBSD, and Windows environments.

License	BSD3
Author:	Happstack team, HAppS LLC
Maintainer:	Happstack team <happs@googlegroups.com>
Home page:	http://happstack.com/
Documentation:	http://www.happstack.com/c/view-page-slug/3/documentation/
Package & repositories	Hackage - Darcs

Happstack is a complete web framework. The main component is happstack-server: an integrated HTTP server, routing combinators, fileserving, etc. In addition, a number of packages that used to be coupled to Happstack have now been decoupled from it, but remain promoted and documented for use with Happstack:

• safecopy: datatype serialization and migration support
• acid-state: a powerful NoSQL ACID storage system with native support for Haskell types

It also includes integration with many 3rd party libraries including:

• templating: Blaze HTML, Hamlet, HSP, HStringTemplate, Heist, and more
• forms: reform
• routing: web-routes type-safe urls and routing
• databases: can be used with most Database interfaces with no special support required

See the Happstack Home Page for more information and to learn how to get support via IRC and mailing lists.

Snap

Snap is a simple web development framework for unix systems, written in the Haskell programming language.

Snap is well-documented and has a test suite with a high level of code coverage, but it is early-stage software with still-evolving interfaces. Snap is therefore likely to be most appropriate for early adopters and potential contributors.

• A fast HTTP server library with an optional high-concurrency backend using the libev event loop library
• A sensible and clean monad for web programming
• An XML-based templating system for generating HTML

License:	BSD3
Author:	James Sanders, Gregory Collins, Doug Beardsley
Maintainer:	snap@snapframework.com
Home page:	http://snapframework.com/
Documentation:	http://snapframework.com/docs
Package & repositories	Hackage - Git

Yesod

Yesod is designed for RESTful, type-safe, performant web apps. By leveraging quasi-quotation for the more boilerplate tasks, we get concise web apps with high levels of type safety. Its Hamlet templates are compile-time checked for correctness, and the controller (web-routes-quasi) uses type-safe URLs to make certain you are only generating valid URLs. It loosely follows Model/View/Controller principles.

License:	BSD3
Author:	Michael Snoyman <michael@snoyman.com>
Maintainer:	Michael Snoyman <michael@snoyman.com>
Announcement:	http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-March/074271.html
Home page:	http://www.yesodweb.com/
Documentation:	http://www.yesodweb.com/book
Screencast:	http://www.yesodweb.com/page/screencasts
Package & repositories	Hackage - Github

Yesod is a full-featured web framework. It takes a modular approach to development, so many parts of the framework such as Hamlet and Persistent are available as standalone packages. However, put together, Yesod provides you with solutions for templating, routing, persistence, sessions, JSON, authentication/authorization, and more. Yesod's major guiding principle is type safety: if your application compiles, it works.

Yesod is very well documented through a combination of haddocks and the Yesod book.

Yesod is built on WAI, or the Web Application Interface. This is similar to WSGI in Python or Rack in Ruby. It provides a single interface that all applications can target and work on multiple backends. Backends exist for CGI, FastCGI, SCGI, development server (auto-recompile) and even a Webkit-powered desktop version.

But the premier backend is Warp: a very simple web server which, at the time of writing, is the fastest Haskell has to offer. You can read more in its release announcement and see some followup benchmarks. Warp is already powering Yesod; some other major players that are planning a move are Hoogle and Happstack.

You can see a list of Yesod-powered sites and packages, or check out the source code for Haskellers. Most discussions for Yesod take place on the yesodweb list, so feel free to join in and ask any questions you have, the Yesod community is very beginner-friendly.

miku

A simple library for fast web prototyping in Haskell, inspired by Ruby's Rack and Sinatra.

License	BSD3
Author	Wang, Jinjing
Maintainer	Wang, Jinjing <nfjinjing@gmail.com>
Package & repositories	Hackage - Github

Lemmachine

Lemmachine is a REST'ful web framework that makes it easy to get HTTP right by exposing users to overridable hooks with sane defaults. The main architecture is a copy of Erlang-based Webmachine, which is currently the best documentation reference (for hooks & general design).

Lemmachine stands out from the dynamically typed Webmachine by being written in dependently typed Agda. The goal of the project is to show the advantages gained from compositional testing by taking advantage of proofs being inherently compositional. See proofs for examples of universally quantified proofs (tests over all possible input values) written against the default resource, which does not override any hooks.

More information

Author	Larry Diehl
Packages & repositories	Github

mohws

A web server with a module system and support for CGI. Based on Simon Marlow's original Haskell Web Server.

License:	BSD3
Copyright:	Simon Marlow, Bjorn Bringert
Author:	Simon Marlow, Bjorn Bringert <bjorn@bringert.net>
Maintainer:	Henning Thielemann <webserver@henning-thielemann.de>
Packages & repositories	Hackage - Darcs

Salvia

Salvia is a feature rich modular web server and web application framework that can be used to write dynamic websites in Haskell. From the lower level protocol code up to the high level application code, everything is written as a Salvia handler. This approach makes the server extremely extensible. To see a demo of a Salvia website, please see the salvia-demo package.

All the low level protocol code can be found in the salvia-protocol package, which exposes the datatypes, parsers and pretty-printers for the URI, HTTP, Cookie and MIME protocols.

This Salvia package itself can be separated into three different parts: the interface, the handlers and the implementation. The interface module defines a number of type classes that the user can build the web application against. Reading the request object, writing to the response, or gaining direct access to the socket, all of these actions are reflected using one type class aspect in the interface. The handlers are self contained modules that implement a single aspect of the Salvia web server. The handlers expose their interface requirements in their type context. Salvia can have multiple implementations which can be switched by using different instances for the interface type classes. This package has only one implementation, a simple accepting socket loop server. The salvia-extras package has two additional implementations. Keeping a clear distinction between the abstract server aspects and the actual implementation makes it very easy to migrate existing web application to different back-ends.

License:	BSD3
Author:	Sebastiaan Visser
Maintainer:	sfvisser@cs.uu.nl
Announcement:	http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2010-March/074870.html
Package & repositories	Hackage - Git

Scotty

A Haskell web framework inspired by Ruby's Sinatra, using WAI and Warp. Sinatra + Warp = Scotty.

Scotty is the cheap and cheerful way to write RESTful, declarative web applications.

• A page is as simple as defining the verb, url pattern, and Text content.
• It is template-language agnostic. Anything that returns a Text value will do.
• Conforms to WAI Application interface.
• Uses very fast Warp webserver by default.

License:	BSD3
Author:	Andrew Farmer
Maintainer:	Andrew Farmer
Home page:	https://github.com/scotty-web/scotty
Documentation:	http://hackage.haskell.org/package/scotty
Package & repositories	Hackage - Git

MFlow

A Haskell application server ++ Web Framework. MFlow is a shorthand for "Message Flow". It is a continuation-based framework without continuations. Instead of other continuation based frameworks like Ocsigen(Ocaml), Coccoon (javascript) or Seaside (Smalltalk), it is based on a backtracking monad that keep the synchornization of the execution state with the user navigation. Since the discontinuation of WASH, MFlow is the only continuation-style framework written in Haskell to date.

Unlike real continuations, the state in MFlow applications is pretty small and serializable, so it is horizontally scalable. The navigation in a MFlow application is safe at compilation time, since even the internal HTML links are checked by the compiler. The code is very short and has little configuration. Routes in MFlow are defined and typechecked in pure haskell code, just like in the case of the menus in a console application. Each page has its own URL so it is RESTful to a certain extent. It is planned to have REST-style URLs in the future (done in the head of the github repo).

It uses standard Haskell web libraries and/or techniques: WAI, Warp, Blaze HTML, HSP. Its core is server and rendering independent. A kind of extended formlets are used to create self contained components, called widgets. They have formatting, Ajax, and server code. They can be composed to create the user interface.

A MFlow application resembles a console application. This is an example of a complete application with three pages. It ask for two numbers and return the sum. At any time, even if the user press the back button, the state is synchronized with the navigation.

   module Main where
   import MFlow.Wai.Blaze.Html.All

   main= do
     addMessageFlows  [("sum", transient . runFlow $ sumIt )]
     wait $ run 8081 waiMessageFlow

   sumIt= do
     setHeader $ html . body
     n1 <- ask $   p << "give me the first number" 
               ++> getInt Nothing 
               <** submitButton "send"

     n2 <- ask $   p << "give me the second number" 
               ++> getInt Nothing 
               <** submitButton "send"

     ask $   p << ("the result is " ++ show (n1 + n2)) 
         ++> wlink () << p << "click here"
 

License:	BSD3
Author:	Alberto Gómez Corona
Maintainer:	Alberto Gómez Corona
Home page:	http://haskell-web.blogspot.com
Documentation:	http://hackage.haskell.org/package/MFlow MFlow paper
Package & repositories	Hackage - Git

See also

• Web/Framework survey