How would the 'Model' in a Rails-type webapp be implemented in a functional programming langauge?
- by ceptorial
In MVC web development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails, Django, and CakePHP, HTTP requests are routed to controllers, which fetch objects which are usually persisted to a backend database store. These objects represent things like users, blog posts, etc., and often contain logic within their methods for permissions, fetching and/or mutating other objects, validation, etc.
These frameworks are all very much object oriented. I've been reading up recently on functional programming and it seems to tout tremendous benefits such as testability, conciseness, modularity, etc. However most of the examples I've seen for functional programming implement trivial functionality like quicksort or the fibonnacci sequence, not complex webapps. I've looked at a few 'functional' web frameworks, and they all seem to implement the view and controller just fine, but largely skip over the whole 'model' and 'persistence' part. (I'm talking more about frameworks like Compojure which are supposed to be purely functional, versus something Lift which conveniently seems to use the OO part of Scala for the model -- but correct me if I'm wrong here.)
I haven't seen a good explanation of how functional programming can be used to provide the metaphor that OO programming provides, i.e. tables map to objects, and objects can have methods which provide powerful, encapsulated logic such as permissioning and validation. Also the whole concept of using SQL queries to persist data seems to violate the whole 'side effects' concept. Could someone provide an explanation of how the 'model' layer would be implemented in a functionally programmed web framework?
