Developing Web Applications with Haskell and Yesod

Preface

It’s fair to say that dynamic languages currently dominate the web development scene. Ruby, Python, and PHP are common choices for quickly creating a powerful web application. They give a much faster and more comfortable development setting than standard static languages in the C family, like Java.

But some of us are looking for something more in our development toolbox. We want a language that gives us guarantees that our code is doing what it should. Instead of writing up a unit test to cover every bit of functionality in our application, wouldn’t it be wonderful if the compiler could automatically ensure that our code is correct? And as an added bonus, wouldn’t it be nice if our code ran quickly too?

These are the goals of Yesod. Yesod is a web framework bringing the strengths of the Haskell programming language to the web development world. Yesod not only uses a pure language to interact with an impure world, it allows safe interactions with the outside world by automatically sanitizing incoming and outgoing data. Not only do we avoid basic mistakes such as mixing up integers and strings, it even allows us to statically prevent many cases of security holes like cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks.

Who This Book Is For

In general, there are two groups of people coming to Yesod. The first group is long time Haskell users—already convinced of the advantages of Haskell—who are looking for a powerful framework for creating web applications. The second is web developers who are ...