Snap Framework Core

This is the first developer prerelease of the Snap Framework Core library. For more information about Snap, read the README.SNAP.md or visit the Snap project website at http://www.snapframework.com/.

Snap is a nascent web framework for Haskell, based on iteratee I/O (as popularized by Oleg Kiselyov).

Library contents

This is the snap-core library, which contains:

• primitive types and functions for HTTP (requests, responses, cookies, post/query parameters, etc).

• type aliases and helper functions for Iteratee I/O.

• a "Snap" monad interface, inspired by happstack's, for programming web handlers, which allows:

  • stateful access to the HTTP request and response objects.

  • monadic failure (i.e. MonadPlus/Alternative instances) for declining to handle requests and chaining handlers together.

  • early termination of the computation if you know early what you want to return and want to prevent further monadic processing.

• Some useful utilities for web handlers, including gzip/zlib compression.

Building snap-core

The snap-core library is built using Cabal and Hackage. Just run

cabal install

from the snap-core toplevel directory.

Building the Haddock Documentation

The haddock documentation can be built using the supplied haddock.sh shell script:

./haddock.sh

The docs get put in dist/doc/html/.

Building the testsuite

Snap is still in its very early stages, so most of the "action" (and a big chunk of the code) right now is centred on the test suite. Snap aims for 100% test coverage, and we're trying hard to stick to that.

To build the test suite, cd into the test/ directory and run

$ cabal configure
$ cabal build

From here you can invoke the testsuite by running:

$ ./runTestsAndCoverage.sh 

The testsuite generates an hpc test coverage report in test/dist/hpc.