To coincide with Hac Phi 2010, the Snap team is happy to announce the first public release of the Snap Framework, a simple and fast Haskell web programming server and library for unix systems. For installation instructions, documentation, and more information, see our website at snapframework.com.

Snap is well-documented and has a test suite with a high level of code coverage, but it is early-stage software with still-evolving interfaces. Snap is therefore most likely to be of interest to early adopters and potential contributors.

Snap is BSD-licensed and currently only runs on Unix platforms; it has been developed and tested on Linux and Mac OSX Snow Leopard.

Snap Features:

• A simple and clean monad for web programming, similar to happstack’s but simpler.

• A fast HTTP server library with an optional high-concurrency backend (using libev).

• An XML-based templating system for generating xhtml that allows you to bind Haskell functionality to XML tags in your templates.

• Some useful utilities for web handlers, including gzip compression and fileServe.

• Iteratee-based I/O, allowing composable streaming in O(1) space without any of the unpredictable consequences of lazy I/O.

If you have questions or comments, please contact us on our mailing list or in the #snapframework channel on the freenode IRC network.