Is Haskell mature enough for web applications? [cl

Question

As it currently stands, this question is not a good fit for our Q&A format. We expect answers to be supported by facts, references, or expertise, but this question will likely solicit debate, arguments, polling, or extended discussion. If you feel that this question can be improved and possibly reopened, visit the help center for guidance.

Closed 7 years ago.

Seems that there are not much work done on Haskell for web. People uses it as a learning tool for functional programming more than business. Has anyone developed and deployed web application on Haskell, yet? Please, share the links.

The next session comments might change my mind and plan something else which could be also useful in terms of business. Guidance, Guidance, Please!

I'm planning to learn a functional programming language and I picked Haskell.

Is Haskell "cooked" enough to develop a commercial web application? Or should I start looking for other options, maybe even something other than a functional programming language, if it is worthy?

Investment in learning a language is very expensive and I want to make sure Haskell is really worth it to learn.

Guidance, Please.

Answer 1

If you think in the long term as well as the short term, Haskell is the best option. It has many different web developments, but there are a lot of commonalities in them, for example all the frameworks use applicative functors for form creation, and the libraries are interchangeable . So if you learn a framework it is easy to change to other since basically the database interface, rendering etc techniques/libraries are the same most of the time. On the other side, there are many things to learn form Haskell even if you decide to change to other language. You will benefit from it. So definitively Haskell is worth to learn.

Thinking as an investment on the future, but perhaps not for doing something terribly critical now, I think that procedural frameworks (either continuation-based or not) are the future of web development, since they are less complex and the code is much more maintainable and intuitive. Examples are: ocsigen (ocaml), seaside (smalltalk), coccoon (javascript), and my own: mflow written in Haskell.

Have you ever seen a three page Web application in a tweet? https://twitter.com/AGoCorona/status/329648864082677760

Answer 2

Now, it is no doubt that haskell can be used for commercial web development as demonstrated by
the company janrain, who is using the web framework snap.

It might be interesting to note that the first version of haskell (haskell 1.0) was released in 1990! And looking at how haskell was then and how it is now one can surely say that there has been a lot of "cooking".

Answer 3

There's a fairly rich ecosystem of web related libraries and a small number of commercial users. The company I work at uses Haskell for web apps in the security market.

Have a look at the libraries to see what is on offer: http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/pkg-list.html#cat:web

Answer 4

I for one consider Haskell to be my secret weapon - that tool that gives me a little edge over other developers, and frequently find places to used it in my consulting jobs.

DSLs, for example, are pretty hot these days in custom software. Haskell is a ridiculously good fit for this type of work.

If that isn't the kind of "commercial" environment you have in mind, some kind of polyglot project is probably best (I think good UI is one of Haskell's weaknesses). I have a project going right now that has Haskell running as a fast cgi "service" in the back end (I tend not to like 'frameworks' too much, and really don't like the ones available for Haskell right now), served up by a Flex (Adobe Flash Platform) front end. The eventual intent for this project will be to be sold commercially* to smaller-to-medium sized businesses as a financial planning aid.

Last thing I'll say is that, while I personally love Haskell, I think its FP in general that provides the biggest direct benefit. To this end, if you find yourself eyeing another FP language such as F#, Scala or Erlang, and think it'll be a better fit then I say run with it.

*Actually, the project will be used internally for at least a year before marketting to outside parties begins.