Template Haskell and the Yesod Web Framework

This month, we have another first-time BFPG speaker! Ben Kolera will give an introduction to Yesod, a Haskell web application framework with compact embedded templating languages, and which emphasises end-to-end type safety.

We will also give an introduction to Template Haskell and Quasiquotation, both Haskell language extensions used extensively in Yesod. Speaker TBC.

Talks will be at an intermediate to advanced level, though we strongly encourage beginners to come and get excited about the possibilities!

As usual, if you get locked out, contact Matt on 0431 926 131, and we'll send someone to deal with you. :-)

Type-safe web development with Yesod and Haskell

Developing and maintaining web applications within the constraints of a stateless client-server protocol is hard enough, without also having to worry about cross-site scripting attacks, SQL injection, and broken links.

The Yesod Web Framework takes much of the worry out of web development, by ensuring that most common web programming errors are caught by the compiler. This means you can focus your development and testing on the interesting parts of your application. Yesod also comes with a number of compact embedded domain-specific templating languages, which give the benefit of type safety, without the overhead.

Under the hood, Yesod uses the excellent GHC compiler and concurrent runtime, and high-quality libraries for streaming data, so you get great performance by default.

In this talk, Ben will lead you through the main features of the Yesod Web Framework, including a number of example applications.

About Ben Kolera

Ben is an experienced Perl, Java and Scala developer. He is also a mad keen fitness fanatic, road cyclist and Muay Thai student, who loves a physical challenge (Tough Mudder Brisbane 2013, anyone?) and embarrassing his coworkers by dancing while working at his desk. In the future, Ben hopes to share his enthusiasm for Haskell and functional programming through teaching, and we welcome his first steps in that direction at BFPG!

Compile-time metaprogramming with Template Haskell

Sometimes, it is easier to programmatically generate code than to write it by hand. Template Haskell supports compile-time generation and manipulation of Haskell code as abstract syntax trees, and allows generated code to be "spliced" into hand-written code at compile time. Quasiquotes further support the generation of Haskell code from arbitrary embedded domain-specific languages.

In this short talk, we introduce Template Haskell and Quasiquotation, by comparison with the less sophisticated approaches to metaprogramming.