Posted in Haskell by Dan on December 3rd, 2008

If you want to generate HTML pages from Haskell, there are a few different approaches available. The Haskell.org wiki lists several web-related libraries.

Text.Html

The standard Haskell libraries include the Text.Html module. This is a combinator library that allows you to generate HTML pages by combining Haskell functions. Each function is responsible for generating an HTML fragment and these fragments are combined to construct a complete page. Haskell’s static type-checking ensures that the output is well-formed (though not necessarily valid).

By arranging your code appropriately, you can achieve a satisfactory separation of presentation and logic, but I’m not comfortable with this approach. The combinator idea works excellently for implementing parsers with Parsec but, in my opinion, is not such a good fit for generating web pages. It reminds me a little bit of the dark age of Java web development when pages were generated by servlets concatenating Strings of HTML tags. The combinator approach is more elegant than the unchecked concatenation of Strings in Java, but it’s still an attempt to internalise HTML. I’d rather write my HTML in HTML than in Haskell (or Java), particularly for complex pages with CSS and JavaScript involved.

WASH/HTML

WASH/HTML is another implementation of the combinator approach. It guarantees both well-formedness and validity of its HTML 4.0.1 output. WASH stands for Web Authoring System Haskell. WASH provides a complete Haskell web stack, of which WASH/HTML is a part. With WASH/HTML, a simple Hello World page is generated using the following code:

build _ document ( head ( title ( text "Hello World!" ) ) ## body ( h1 ( text "Hello World!" ) ) )

Haskell Server Pages

Haskell Server Pages (HSP) brings the ASP/JSP/PHP model to Haskell. In other words, it mixes presentation mark-up with computations. There are a some minor differences in the Haskell implementation of this idea compared to the imperative variants. Perhaps most interestingly, all XML fragments are actually Haskell expressions, which allows the type-checker to enforce well-formedness. Using HSP, an HTML page can be expressed as a Haskell function as follows (where helloWorld is another function that generates the text content for the page):

page = < html > < head >< title > Hello World !</ title ></ head > < body >< p ><% helloWorld %></ p ></ body > </ html >

This is a lot closer to pure HTML than the combinator libraries. HSP also supports the concept of XML pages and hybrid pages, so instead we can create an actual HTML document that includes Haskell code fragments:

<% import System.Time %> <html> <head><title>XML page</title></head> <body> <h1>Hello World!</h1> <p>Page requested at <% getSystemTime %></p> </body> </html>

HSP has roughly the same high-level benefits and drawbacks as JSP and PHP. These technologies give you a lot of power but they can also lead you astray. It takes discipline to maintain a clean separation between logic and presentation. Since HSP permits (requires) side-effects, there’s nothing to stop you from doing truly ugly things such as embedding database update logic in the code that generates your HTML pages.

HStringTemplate

HStringTemplate is a Haskell port of Terence Parr’s StringTemplate engine (originally for Java but also available for C# and Python). StringTemplate is a templating engine along the lines of Apache Velocity but is more restrictive in what processing it permits templates to perform. Specifically, it strictly enforces separation between model and view. It is not possible for a template to cause side-effects elsewhere (no database updates, etc.). StringTemplate can be used for generating any kind of text output, not just XML/HTML. In fact, one of its principal uses is as a code generator for ANTLR.

I have chosen to use HStringTemplate, in preference to the alternatives described above, for my current Haskell project.

A StringTemplate template for an HTML page looks something like this (the StringTemplate website provides more details of the kinds of expressions that can be used):

<html> <head><title>Hello</title></head> <body><p>Hello $name$</p></body> </html>

To convert this into an HTML page, the template must be parsed, a value assigned to the “name” attribute, and the HTML rendered to a file. The Haskell code to do this might look like this (see the Haddock documentation for descriptions of the various functions):

import Text . StringTemplate main = do templateText <- readFile "templateFile" template = newSTMP templateText writeFile "outputFile" html where html = toString $ setAttribute "name" "Dan" template

This is only a very simple example. The StringTemplate template language provides facilities for working with lists and maps, and for recursion and basic conditionals. HStringTemplate defines the type class ToSElem for mapping custom data types to types that can be inserted into a template.