When comparing Happstack Lite vs IHP, the Slant community recommends Happstack Lite for most people. In the question“What are the best Haskell web frameworks for building RESTful web services?” Happstack Lite is ranked 4th while IHP is ranked 10th. The most important reason people chose Happstack Lite is:
There is extensive documentation and tutorials for Happstack and Happstack Lite available for use. Documentation and tutorials help programmers write their code; with so many options, programmers will have an easy time learning the framework.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Has extensive documentation
There is extensive documentation and tutorials for Happstack and Happstack Lite available for use. Documentation and tutorials help programmers write their code; with so many options, programmers will have an easy time learning the framework.
Pro Molded through 7+ years of feedback
Happstack has been around for over seven years. During this time developers used the framework and offered feedback to improve it. As a result, it is stable and unlikely to have major changes. Happstack Lite was created from all of this feedback
Pro Shares all of its components on gitHub
Having open source means that developers can customize the framework and offer suggestions and solutions to the code.
Pro Easy for beginners
With the code generators even haskell beginners can easily build CRUD apps.
Pro Under the hood
Code generators, database schema editors, etc. work with Haskell and SQL files, which can also be edited manually, to get 'under the hood'.
Pro Instant live reloading
Makes for a super smooth development experience.
Pro HSX
If you have experience with react, you feel right at home with the HSX view syntax.
Cons
Con Handles exceptions poorly
When an exception occurs on the server, the error gets printed. By seeing an error that makes no sense to the user, his experience is negatively impacted. Having a negative experience can mean a user never visits the site again.
Con Allows bad code by not enforcing logic separation
Happstack allows developers to write code for controllers, routing, and models together. Doing so will dirty the code and make maintenance harder.
Con (Small) Server deployment
I'm a bit unclear on the memory requirements for the server (which becomes less of an issue every following year).