Servant is a domain-specific language embedded in Haskell that allows the specification of web APIs as Haskell types.
Once such an API has been specified, it can be used to drive the implementation of various components, such as a server handling requests according to the API, or also a client that sends requests according to the API, or also documentation of the API itself.
In all these cases, most of the program is derived automatically from the shape of API, and the developer only has to fill in the remaining parts, such as the handlers for a server, or the endpoint descriptions for documentation. And everything happens in a type-safe way.
Servant therefore shows nicely that types can do more for us than just catch errors; they can instead help us write parts of our programs automatically for us, and guide us in their construction.
In this tutorial, we will incrementally develop a small web backend application in Haskell using Servant, and look a little bit at how it works internally and can be extended with new functionality.
The language of the tutorial is English.
Servant makes use of various Haskell language extensions for type-level programming. These will be introduced as we go. However, some basic familiarity with Haskell or at least another statically typed functional programming language is going to be helpful.
This GitHub repository has instructions for following along with the tutorial.
Andres Löh is a Haskell consultant and co-owner of Well-Typed LLP. He is based in Regensburg, Germany. He started using Haskell in 1997, when being an undergraduate student of mathematics in Konstanz, and has been an enthusiastic functional programmer ever since. Andres obtained a PhD in Computer Science from Utrecht University in 2004, on extending the Haskell language with capabilities for datatype-generic programming. After having been a university lecturer for several years, he joined Well-Typed in 2010.
Andres is very interested in applying functional programming to real-world problems, and in particular in datatype-generic programming, domain-specific languages, (dependent) type systems, parallel and concurrent programming, and the theory of version control.
