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blazeT Build Status Hackage

A true monad (transformer) version of the blaze-markup and blaze-html libraries:

BlazeHtml is a blazingly fast HTML combinator library for the Haskell programming language. It embeds HTML templates in Haskell code for optimal efficiency and composability.

— from https://jaspervdj.be/blaze/.

What’s wrong with blaze?

Blaze’s Markup and Html cannot be used as Monads, let alone Monad transformers.

While blaze's Markup and Html types have Monad instances and can leverage the concise do notation, they do not satisfy the Monad Laws.

How do Monads help? - Use Cases

The MarkupT Monad Transformer enables us to write Markup (e.g. HTML) templates that have access to all those Monads you cannot live without anymore.

The first things that come to mind:

  • Accessing an environment (MonadReader)
  • Logging and other diagnostic output (MonadWriter),
  • IO (e.g. for database access)

The reason for the existence of this library is its use in Lykah, which powers my personal website http://johannesgerer.com. In Lykah, the HTML templates have access to the whole site structure (to build things like menus or blog post lists) and automatically check, insert and keep track of referenced pages and assets, which turns out to be very useful functionality of a static website generator.

Usage

Integrating with your existing code

The library is intended to serve as a drop-in replacement for the blaze-markup and blaze-html libraries and should be backwards compatible:

Simply replace your module Text.Blaze.* imports with module Text.BlazeT.* and it should give the same results.

For usage of blaze check out their documentation.

Unleash the monads

Text.BlazeT exports runWith and execWith, which work on any Text.BlazeT.Renderer.*. The rendered markup will be returned within the base monad, whose actions can be lifted into the Markup, as shown in the following example (from here):

{-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}

import Data.Time (getCurrentTime)
import Text.BlazeT.Html5 hiding (main)
import Text.BlazeT.Renderer.String
import Control.Monad.Trans.Class (lift)

-- Backwords compatible Blaze HTML
old :: Markup
old = do
  p $ "created with blaze-html"

-- BlazeT HTML with lifted IO actions
new :: MarkupT IO ()
new = do
  time <- lift getCurrentTime
  p $ string $ "created with blazeT at " ++ show time

main :: IO ()
main = do
  putStrLn $            renderMarkup old
  putStrLn =<< execWith renderMarkup new

prints:

<p>created with blaze-html</p>
<p>created with blazeT at 2016-10-26 01:09:16.969147361 UTC</p>

Installation

  1. To make it available on your system (or sandbox) use cabal install blazeT.

  2. To play around with the source, obtain by cloning this repo or use cabal get blazet, enter the directory and run:

cabal sandbox init #optional
cabal install

Documentation on Hackage

Implementation

... is contained in Text.BlazeT.Internals.

Everything is build around the simple newtype definition of the MarkupT transformer, which makes use the Monoid instance of Blaze.Markup and is simply a WriterT writing Blaze.Markup:

newtype MarkupT m a = MarkupT { fromMarkupT :: WriterT B.Markup m a }

The old Text.Blaze.Markup type is replaced by a rank-2 version of the transformer:

type Markup = forall m . Monad m => MarkupT m ()

Wrappers used to lift all Blaze entities into BlazeT are trivially expressible using basic WriterT class methods. Wrapping Blaze.Markup is simply WriterT.tell:

wrapMarkupT :: Monad m => B.Markup -> MarkupT m ()
wrapMarkupT = tell

Wrapping functions that modify Blaze.Markup is simply WriterT.censor:

wrapMarkupT2 :: Monad m => (B.Markup -> B.Markup) -> MarkupT m a -> MarkupT m a
wrapMarkupT2 = censor