The Snap team is happy to announce the release of version 0.12 of the Snap Framework.

New features

• Heist now has the ability to reload templates. Along with this, HeistConfig now stores template locations instead of templates. A template location is essentially an IO action returning templates. This allows you to have Heist get its templates from a database, over the network, etc–anything that can be done from IO.

• The Heist snaplet now has generic functions that can work with either interpreted or compiled templates. Most applications will choose one of either interpreted or compiled templates and not need this new functionality. However, if you are writing a generic snaplet, then you probably want it to work no matter which mode the end application uses. All you need to do is import the Snap.Snaplet.Heist.Generic module. The Heist snaplet defaults to compiled mode. If you want to use interpreted mode, call the setInterpreted function in your application initializer.

• It is now possible to reload individual snaplets without reloading the whole site. The snaplet API now includes a function modifyMaster that you can use to write reload functions for individual snaplets. The Heist snaplet now provides a reloader leveraging this functionality. We found this very useful in allowing us to rapidly iterate when making changes to markup in large applications that take a long time to initialize.

Bugfixes / minor improvements

• Generalized parts of the compiled splice API to use RuntimeSplice n a instead of the less general n a. Since RuntimeSplice is a monad transformer, this change only requires you to add a call to lift in places where you have an n a.

• Fixed Heist’s runAttributesRaw function to do both types of attribute parsing.

• Fixed Heist bug that caused XML templates to be rendered as HTML5.

• Improve the consistency of the auth snaplet API.

• Eliminated the inappropriate export of orphan instances.