Partial transcript (19:30–21:30)
Pat Brisbin: “We actually shipped some Haskell. We wanted to evaluate shipping an actual production application for ourselves before looking for client work. We decided to add comments to our blog, as sort of a third-party Discus-like system that you can just kind of plug in. So, we call that Carnival, and that’s actually open-source. Which has been really great, because when I have a discussion with people about things, I can link them to it, and they can see a real-world example of an actual production web app, written in Haskell. Which is great.”
Ben Orenstein: “And that went pretty well? I remember the development went well, and the deployment was kind of a pain at first?”
Pat: “Yeah. The Haskell side of things was super easy. It’s a JSON API with a JavaScript front-end, and that was done relatively quickly. And if we had taken some shortcuts, deployment would’ve been fine, but we really wanted to see what would happen when we tried to do this using our actual deployment practices — which is, use CoffeeScript, and deploy to Heroku, and those two things were the biggest headache out of all of it.”
Ben: “Interesting. That was the tooling?”
Pat: “I know; I know. So, that was a hassle; we muddled through; we finally got it done. I would go into the ultimate solution, except that the problem’s gotten better since then.”
Ben: “Right. Was that from Heroku’s work?”
Pat: “That was actually from a project called Halcyon, and a Haskell on Heroku buildpack, which uses Halcyon. I actually don’t know the developer’s full name — I know his username; it’s Mietek. He’s just been all over the place developing this thing. Crazy, crazy effort; made a really solid tool. So, we moved over to that for deployment, and it’s been pretty smooth sailing since then. There’s still hiccups here and there, but light-years ahead of where we were, when we originally launched.”
Ben: “Yeah. So, if you’re thinking of building a web service with Haskell, you can deploy to Heroku pretty reasonably?”
Pat: “Yeah, absolutely.”
For more information on Carnival, Halcyon, and Haskell on Heroku, see “Ship You a Haskell” and “Building Haskell Projects with Halcyon” on the thoughtbot blog.