Hello! It is I, your editor Jeremy Shaw. I am pleased to bring you Happstack Irregular News Issue #2. Some exciting things have happened since the last issue!

clckwrks

The biggest news since the last issue is the release of clckwrks:

clckwrks

clckwrks is a Haskell-based blog and CMS framework with support for editing pages via the browser plus downloadable themes and plugins.

clckwrks is now powering happstack.com and clckwrks.com.

We are currently focusing on making the clckwrks blogging portion solid. We have moved the official Happstack blog to clckwrks in order to encourage us to make it better :)

If you want to help out, you can browse our bug list and find something to take action on. We are more than happy to provide guidance and other assistance.

reform

The other new big release was reform. reform is a form generation library that continues in the footsteps of formlets and digestive-functors <= 0.2. digestive-functors 0.3 has gone off to explore a different direction, and we wanted to continue pushing the development in this direction. There are still many ideas we can share between the two libraries. Two changes we want to make in the next release include:

  1. switch to Bifunctors package instead of homebrewed IndexedApplicative (thanks to Leonid Onokhov for pointing that out). (Another alternative might be index-core, though it does not yet export the Applicative instances).

  2. consider using a Free Applicative / Operational Applicative for implementing the reform applicative instances. digestive functors 0.3 does something like this and Jasper Van der Jeugt said it was very beneficial and we should try it in reform as well.

happstack-yui

Dag Odenhall has released happstack-yui, which makes it easy to use YUI with Happstack. According the YUI website:

"YUI is a free, open source JavaScript and CSS framework for building richly interactive web applications."

happstack-yui

YUI website

HSX

Niklas Broberg and I (Jeremy Shaw) did some work on HSX. It now builds with GHC 7.4 and we also fixed some hidden bugs in HSX.Transform. One thing we have been experimenting with is a QuasiQuoter for HSX. A demo version can be found here:

darcs get http://src.seereason.com/hsx-qq/

The QQ provides an alternative to the trhsx preprocessor and allows you to write things like:

html :: (XMLGenerator m) => XMLGenT m (XMLType m)
html = [hsx| <p class="foo"><% map toUpper "hello, world!"  %></p> |]

This should be included in the next release of HSX.

The next release of HSX will also contain a major refactoring of the packages. Mostly we are just planning to move modules into different packages and divide things up differently. One major benefit of the new arrangement is that you will no longer be required to install HJavaScript and HJScript even though you probably never use them.

Other Minor Fixes

  • changed types in happstack-lite so that serveFile and asContentType work better together, and added guessContentType, MimeMap, mimeType

  • patched happstack-jmacro to work with older versions of template haskell

  • tweaks to ixset.cabal so that it does not require the latest Cabal to build

acid-state and hackage2

I have started research into why hackage2 requires so much RAM to run. I will be blogging about that separately. I do expect that we can substantially reduce that amount of RAM it requires. So far I have uncovered two minor issues:

  1. it turns out that mapM Lazy.readFile fileList returns the file contents lazily but opens all the files immediately. This means you can run out of file descriptors if you have a lot of checkpoints or event files. A patch has been submitted for acid-state and it will be fixed in the next release.

  2. acid-state reads the entire checkpoint file into RAM before decoding it. There are a couple places in the code that cause this to happen. The first place is in cereal. The getLazyByteString function does return a lazy ByteString.. but it does it by first reading a strict ByteString of the required length and then converting it into a lazy ByteString. Changing the behavior of getLazyByteString is actually quite difficult, as cereal was designed to allow for value-level error handling, instead of throwing async exceptions.

    We can probably work around this by using runGetState to get one-chunk at a time and build the lazy ByteString that way. That might actually be a lot less hackish than it sounds at first, because it allows us to explicity detect and handle failure cases and control how much and when things are read into RAM. Though, at that point, it starts to feel a bit like enumerators/iteratee/etc. Perhaps we will switch to pipes at some point in time. pipes provides streaming for pure (non-IO) values -- which is probably what we want here.

ELM

Evan Czaplicki has been doing a ton of work on ELM recently. As described on the ELM Language Homepage:

"Elm is a type-safe, functional reactive language that compiles to HTML, CSS, and JavaScript."

It is easy to use ELM with Happstack -- no special support is required. (i.e., we do not need happstack-elm). Vincent Ambo has created a simple demo here:

elm-happstack demo

web-routes + Hamlet

Vincent also wrote a nice blog post showing how to combine web-routes (type-safe URL routing) with Hamlet (a QuasiQuoter for generating blaze-html from HTML-like syntax):

Best of both worlds: Using Hamlet and web-routes with Happstack

quasi-quoter for language-css

JMacro is great for creating JavaScript, but we still have a hole when it comes to generating CSS. The language-css library already contains combinators and a syntax ADT for CSS3.

If it had a parser, then we could also create a syntax-checking [css| |] QuasiQuoter.

I have discussed the idea with Anton Kholomiov, and he is interested -- but we could use some one else to help write the parser. If you love writing parsers, this should be a fun little project.

happstack.com theme

Finally, if you could suggest one thing that would make the happstack.com website nicer that would be awesome. There are four things we already plan to change:

  1. use black on white text instead of gray on white

  2. fix the paragraph width so that paragraphs are around 45em wide.

  3. fix the grid alignment so that things are properly aligned to the grid

  4. add more dates to the pages so that it clear that the site and project is still active

If you have other suggestions, we would love to hear them! If you want to hack on the theme directly, that is even better!

Until next time, happy hacking.

Jeremy Shaw