Haxl is a Haskell library that simplifies access to remote data, such as databases or web-based services. Haxl can automatically
- batch multiple requests to the same data source,
- request data from multiple data sources concurrently,
- cache previous requests.
Having all this handled for you behind the scenes means that your data-fetching code can be much cleaner and clearer than it would otherwise be if it had to worry about optimizing data-fetching. We'll give some examples of how this works in the pages linked below.
There are two Haskell packages here:
-
haxl
: The core Haxl framework -
haxl-facebook
(inexample/facebook): An (incomplete) example data source for accessing the Facebook Graph API
To use Haxl in your own application, you will likely need to build one or more data sources : the thin layer between Haxl and the data that you want to fetch, be it a database, a web API, a cloud service, or whatever. The haxl-facebook
package shows how we might build a Haxl data source based on the existing fb
package for talking to the Facebook Graph API.