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[Caml-list] List of sites running in Ocaml?

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Berke Durak

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Apr 10, 2008, 6:55:46 AM4/10/08
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Hello,

Ocsigen seems to have sparked an emerging interest for web frameworks written in functional languages.
I'd like to compile an exhaustive list of pages or sites using Ocaml as frontends or backends, with the
technologies they use. Please do not hesitate to add any past or present running Ocaml site or page,
even if its a personal site.

Public sites:
* Gerd's Camlcity: http://www.camlcity.org/
* The Ocsigen site itself: http://ocsigen.org/
* The Merjis site and Cocanwiki: http://merjis.com/
* The ara and anla servers, part of the EDOS project : http://brion.inria.fr/ara http://brion.inria.fr/anla
Runs using a small multithreaded HTTP module, with gzip compression, and a simple sum type for documents.
* I'll insert a shameless plug for a comic strip in french, Massacre à la Ronchonneuse (http://ronchonneuse.com/),
which runs under my pet Ocaml framework thru lighttpd + SCGI; thanks to Sexplib for the persistance!

Many other people rolled their own HTTP servers (for instance Stefano Zacchiroli's ocaml-http). Please tell
if they are or were running somewhere.

* Does ocamlcore.org run under Ocaml?

Off-line generation:
* Alain Frisch's personal site: http://alain.frisch.fr/ generated using Cduce, of course

CGIs:
* The Caml Humps, which I assume run as Ocaml CGI scripts: http://caml.inria.fr//cgi-bin/hump.en.cgi
* Aurochs parser demo: http://aurochs.fr/cgi/demo.cgi (mine)

Backends:
* I have been told Wink uses Ocaml as a backend.

Intranet:
* Impala at INRIA
* From my Paris 7 days I recall a webapp to allocate teachers and assistants to courses. I seem to remember
that it was written in Ocaml? I'm sure there are other internal apps at Paris 7 in Ocaml.

Possible candidates:
* Lexify
* Jane Street
* Haxe and Motion Twin

--
Berke DURAK

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Gerd Stolpmann

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Apr 10, 2008, 7:50:39 AM4/10/08
to Berke Durak, Caml-list List

Am Donnerstag, den 10.04.2008, 12:55 +0200 schrieb Berke Durak:
> Hello,
>
> Ocsigen seems to have sparked an emerging interest for web frameworks written in functional languages.
> I'd like to compile an exhaustive list of pages or sites using Ocaml as frontends or backends, with the
> technologies they use. Please do not hesitate to add any past or present running Ocaml site or page,
> even if its a personal site.
>...

> Backends:
> * I have been told Wink uses Ocaml as a backend.

Yes, that's true. A substantial part of the search application on
wink.com is written in OCaml. This includes mostly offline components
like the crawler, the parsers, some distributed storage systems, but
also the so-called abstract server which operates directly behind the
frontend and coordinates the various backend systems that must work
together to do a search. Summed up around 120,000 lines of
application-specific code (just counted with wc).

Gerd
--
------------------------------------------------------------
Gerd Stolpmann * Viktoriastr. 45 * 64293 Darmstadt * Germany
ge...@gerd-stolpmann.de http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
Phone: +49-6151-153855 Fax: +49-6151-997714
------------------------------------------------------------

Sylvain Le Gall

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Apr 10, 2008, 9:25:06 AM4/10/08
to caml...@inria.fr
On 10-04-2008, Berke Durak <berke...@exalead.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Ocsigen seems to have sparked an emerging interest for web frameworks written in functional languages.
> I'd like to compile an exhaustive list of pages or sites using Ocaml as frontends or backends, with the
> technologies they use. Please do not hesitate to add any past or present running Ocaml site or page,
> even if its a personal site.
>
> Public sites:
> * Does ocamlcore.org run under Ocaml?

There is just a little CGI script written with ocamlnet(CGI)+sqlite to
manage feed subscription. Most of the website is run through standard
web application that can be found directly in debian (gforge, planet,
mailman...).

But we are open to include more OCaml part, for replacing non-OCaml
part (for now we want something working to know what interest OCaml
community -- then we can choose what should be the bigger/best part to
replace with a great ocaml application).

>
> Possible candidates:
> * Lexify
> * Jane Street
> * Haxe and Motion Twin

MLState: www.mlstate.com

Regards,
Sylvain Le Gall

Luca Pascali

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Apr 10, 2008, 4:46:56 PM4/10/08
to Caml List
Berke Durak wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Ocsigen seems to have sparked an emerging interest for web frameworks
> written in functional languages.
> I'd like to compile an exhaustive list of pages or sites using Ocaml as
> frontends or backends, with the
> technologies they use. Please do not hesitate to add any past or
> present running Ocaml site or page,
> even if its a personal site.
>

I am writing my personal web site using a beta version of ex-nunc
( http://www.ex-nunc.org )

My website is not yet online, but it will be soon.
I'm joining ex-nunc development team and I'm doing some tests.

As soon as it will be online, I'll announce it.

Regards

Luca Pascali

Jon Harrop

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Apr 11, 2008, 2:37:01 AM4/11/08
to caml...@yquem.inria.fr
On Thursday 10 April 2008 11:55:37 Berke Durak wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Ocsigen seems to have sparked an emerging interest for web frameworks
> written in functional languages. I'd like to compile an exhaustive list of
> pages or sites using Ocaml as frontends or backends, with the technologies
> they use.

Our OCaml and F#.NET Journal articles are all generated from custom source by
an OCaml program:

http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_journal/
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_journal/

We are in the process of converting the entire site to being autogenerated by
similar OCaml programs. However, we have yet to do anything dynamic
(including a shopping cart). I'd appreciate any advice on that, BTW.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e

Berke Durak

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Apr 11, 2008, 8:19:57 AM4/11/08
to Caml-list List
Thanks for your replies. I've created a list at the Cocan wiki. Please correct
any inaccuracies and provide details, if you can, about what you used.

http://cocan.org/web_sites_using_ocaml

I don't know what the owners of the COCAN wiki would think about it, but IMHO
it would be appropriate for the authors/maintainers of these sites to explain
the techniques they used in a small page. Some performance metrics could also
make "dynamic fanboys" envious (I'm thinking of Ruby users frustrated by the
excruciating slowness of that language). This could also apply to other
software projects.

Think of prospective new users looking for what they could do in Ocaml.

BTW the COCAN wiki is a great place for centralized information and the wiki
itself is a joy to use.

PS. I've also added an "Ocaml success stories" page with a list of well-known Ocaml
software (coq, unison, mldonkey, etc.)

Jon Harrop

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Apr 11, 2008, 9:17:49 AM4/11/08
to caml...@yquem.inria.fr
On Friday 11 April 2008 13:19:35 Berke Durak wrote:
> PS. I've also added an "Ocaml success stories" page with a list of
> well-known Ocaml software (coq, unison, mldonkey, etc.)

You've missed lots of even bigger applications of OCaml, like FFTW. You may
find some of our related blog articles of interest:

http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/functional-programming-in-industry.html
http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/most-popular-functional-languages-on.html
http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-10-most-popular-ocaml-programs.html
http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/09/xensource-sell-for-500m.html

I also forgot to mention that we are following FFTW's lead and using OCaml to
generate source code in more mainstream languages that we can sell. This is
technically known as "geometric money in linear time". :-)

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e

_______________________________________________

Berke Durak

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Apr 11, 2008, 10:05:41 AM4/11/08
to Jon Harrop, caml...@yquem.inria.fr
Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Friday 11 April 2008 13:19:35 Berke Durak wrote:
>> PS. I've also added an "Ocaml success stories" page with a list of
>> well-known Ocaml software (coq, unison, mldonkey, etc.)
> You've missed lots of even bigger applications of OCaml, like FFTW. You may
> find some of our related blog articles of interest:
>
> http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2007/09/functional-programming-in-industry.html
> http://flyingfrogblog.blogspot.com/2007/11/most-popular-functional-languages-on.html
> http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/12/top-10-most-popular-ocaml-programs.html
> http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/09/xensource-sell-for-500m.html

Added those, but you should edit the page, too! It's a wiki after all.

> I also forgot to mention that we are following FFTW's lead and using OCaml to
> generate source code in more mainstream languages that we can sell. This is
> technically known as "geometric money in linear time". :-)

Are you are implying that Ocaml is exponentially more succinct than your
target language (C/C++ I guess?), and that customers are willing to buy at a
price computed from slocs in the target language ? :)
--
Berke DURAK

Dario Teixeira

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Apr 11, 2008, 10:47:31 AM4/11/08
to Luca Pascali, Caml List
> I am writing my personal web site using a beta version of ex-nunc
> ( http://www.ex-nunc.org )
>
> My website is not yet online, but it will be soon.
> I'm joining ex-nunc development team and I'm doing some tests.
>
> As soon as it will be online, I'll announce it.


Hi,

Ex-nunc seems very similar in scope to Eliom from the Ocsigen project.
Could you tell us a bit more about the differences/goals?

Cheers,
Dario

___________________________________________________________
Yahoo! For Good helps you make a difference

http://uk.promotions.yahoo.com/forgood/

Richard Jones

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Apr 11, 2008, 11:42:41 AM4/11/08
to Berke Durak, Caml-list List
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 02:19:35PM +0200, Berke Durak wrote:
> I don't know what the owners of the COCAN wiki would think about it, but
> IMHO
> it would be appropriate for the authors/maintainers of these sites to
> explain
> the techniques they used in a small page. Some performance metrics could
> also
> make "dynamic fanboys" envious (I'm thinking of Ruby users frustrated by the
> excruciating slowness of that language). This could also apply to other
> software projects.

We have this page which needs some love:

http://cocan.org/comparisons/web_application

Rich.

--
Richard Jones
Red Hat

David MENTRE

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Apr 11, 2008, 4:08:51 PM4/11/08
to Richard Jones, Caml-list List
Hello,

2008/4/11 Richard Jones <ri...@annexia.org>:


> We have this page which needs some love:
>
> http://cocan.org/comparisons/web_application

I don't know if it can help, but this page could be used as input:
https://demexp.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=en:web_client_development_framework#comparison_of_ocaml_frameworks

Yours,
d.

Michael Ekstrand

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Apr 11, 2008, 6:40:35 PM4/11/08
to caml...@inria.fr
Berke Durak <berke...@exalead.com> writes:
> Ocsigen seems to have sparked an emerging interest for web frameworks
> written in functional languages. I'd like to compile an exhaustive
> list of pages or sites using Ocaml as frontends or backends, with the
> technologies they use. Please do not hesitate to add any past or
> present running Ocaml site or page, even if its a personal site.

My personal site, <http://www.elehack.net>. Static website compiler
built in OCaml, generating pages with a bit of PHP in them for the
actual server-side stuff (although changing all that to server-side
OCaml with FastCGI is in my list of things-to-do).

- Michael

--
mouse, n: A device for pointing at the xterm in which you want to type.

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