ericrasmussen / learn-snap Goto Github PK

This is a sample Snap application that uses Heist for templating and digestive-functors for forms. Contributions of additional sample forms or Heist library usage are very welcome! Additional details and build instructions below.

Heist is a Haskell templating library commonly used with the Snap Framework. Heist keeps business logic out of the templates by giving you facilities for manipulating the templates in code. For instance, extracting and repeating template nodes from code instead of having a special template syntax for looping and conditions.

Digestive Functors is a Haskell form library inspired by Formlets and providing a succinct API for building and validating forms. You can use this library independent of any web framework or templating system, but the examples here will use it exclusively with Snap and compiled Heist.

Although each of the libraries used here have nice documentation and a few examples, there aren't many (or at the time of this writing, any) examples showing how they all work together. The aim of this site is to show off how easy and effective it is to build a form-heavy website using this libraries, and to offer a fully working codebase that you can clone and experiment with.

1. git clone [email protected]:ericrasmussen/learn-snap.git
2. cd learn-snap
3. nix-build

This was last built with ghc 7.6.3 and cabal 1.18.0. These steps assume you have those installed at the same major versions (ghc in particular sometimes introduces breaking changes in new major versions, so no guarantees for this building easily in future versions).

1. git clone [email protected]:ericrasmussen/learn-snap.git
2. cd learn-snap
3. cabal sandbox init
4. cabal install --only-dependencies
5. (wait patiently)
6. cabal build
7. dist/build/snap-heist-examples/learnsnap -p 3000

The last step will launch the app and server locally on port 3000 (you can use a different port if you like, and it will default to 8000 if unspecified).

At that point you can interact with it in your browser (usually localhost:3000), modify the templates and restart the application to see the changes, or change the code and run cabal build again.

Have fun!