[Haskell-cafe] haskellwiki slow/unresponsive

Greg Weber greg at gregweber.info
Mon Jun 6 22:45:29 CEST 2011


>
> Those are definitely valid concerns. Has anyone made a wiki-like site with
> Yesod? I hadn't heard of Yesod until I joined this mailing list, but I've
> seen quite a bit of buzz around it since then. If a large enough chunk of
> the community is backing a framework and focusing on making it secure and
> reliable, then it should be possible to build applications with it (wikis,
> blogs, etc.) that draw on the framework's strength and security. You may
> still have security issues, but if they're continually addressed and
> maintained at the framework level it benefits everyone building
> applications
> on top of that framework. I'm still relatively new to the Haskell
> community
> so I apologize if much of this has been addressed before!


It is dead-simple to deploy a fast haskell web app, so haskell *might* have
a chance at solving the problem, but likely it can be fixed much faster by
doing a better job configuring the server or adding more resources.

I think that security issues are a bit of a red herring. You can go through
potential security issues one-by-one and basically make them impossible in a
web/wiki framework (as we are doing in Yesod). Of course this is easier to
do with a type system in Haskell. And of course some security is outside the
scope of the software and needs to be established by procedure (admin server
access should only be through ssh key, etc).
Gitit uses darcs or git to store data, but through the command line
interfaces. Unfortunately to my knowledge darcs does not expose a library
interface. Gitit could be made faster and more secure by interfacing with
libgit2.
Even though it is may not be socially acceptable to state it, it is likely
that gitit or any haskell library would be more secure in practice because
it is more obscure. And the kind of security we really care about in the
wiki- the wiki page content- can be easily replicated and restored.

I definitely agree that the hard and boring part of switching to a haskell
wiki is converting existing MediaWiki content and configuration to a new
system- that would have to be investigated first.

Unfortunately this is probably all bike-shedding and my original question of
how can the community speed up the wiki hasn't been answered :)

Greg Weber
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