Has anyone used WebSharper on any full projects?

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It looks like quite a cool idea, but a cursory google search finds nothing but code snippets: no "large" projects that are made purely using WebSharper, that would serve as a sanity check "this really works". Any experience playing around with it for a somewhat extensive period of time (i.e. to make a blog or personal website) would also be useful.

In theory it sounds like a wonderful idea: compiling a single language to multiple things to run on client, server, etc.. Typically though, the abstraction is leaky and/or restrictive enough to make it just as annoying as writing the multiple languages by hand (that's my experience with GWT) and was wondering if WebSharper was any different.

Molecular answered 27/10, 2011 at 14:30 Comment(1)

Note that now that I think about it, I realize I know of more sites built with WebSharper than with MVC & entire F# back-end (controllers, etc). – Postulant 27/10, 2011 at 20:53

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As creators of WebSharper we have used it internally quite a bit, the largest project to date being FPish (http://fpish.net). Our clients use WebSharper for large projects as well, this work includes an enterprise online data visualization solution. So yes, it passes the sanity check.

That being said, there are areas where WebSharper could do a better job to support larger projects, such as compilation speed, and we are working to address those.

You make an interesting point about the restrictive or leaky abstractions. I have not used GWT, so I cannot comment much on that. Because of its functional type system I find F# to be vastly superior to both Java and JavaScript, which makes me more productive using WebSharper. Switching to F# can be a hard sell though.

Julius answered 27/10, 2011 at 14:30 Comment(6)

Is the FPish source available? I'd like to see a complete site--something a bit more than the websharper.com demos. – Amaliaamalie 27/10, 2011 at 15:22

FPish is not open, and I doubt it will be soon. I'm not sure if anyone I can think of will agree to publish the whole source. – Bracken 27/10, 2011 at 15:32

Too bad. I think a complete site could/would be more compelling than an input form or "hello world." A developer license for a company is $2K+. I would have to see a complete, "real-world" site to gauge development and maintenance costs before plunking down that much money. – Amaliaamalie 27/10, 2011 at 15:41

My concern's similar. It's a bit of a leap as an individual to plonk down several hundred Euros on product I don't see anyone else using, even though I would very much like a F# web dev framework & javascript cross compiler for some random personal projects. – Molecular 28/10, 2011 at 2:46

I suggest first using the free trial, and second waiting a bit. There should be a new licensing system which would make the prices more reasonable for single developers. – Bracken 28/10, 2011 at 4:35

@li, you can use the latest WebSharper under AGPL terms without paying anything, should work OK for personal projects. – Uhf 13/2, 2012 at 19:20

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Speaking from experience on other products, what I generally look for are those uncommon scenarios where you'll spend 80% of your time on something that should be straightforward. An example of what I mean would be resetting page count in an SSRS 2005/2008 report such that you get 1/2, 2/2, 1/3, 2/3, 3/3. You can spend an inordinate amount of time trying to do that simple thing in SSRS which should be simple to do.

I have encountered no such scenario in over 100 hours working with WebSharper. The product is very "FSharpy" and I never have to look at the generated JavaScript code.

I really recommend you try it out, but know that the APIs are quite large and I personally got lost distinguishing between server-side markup and client side code at first.

All my sites are back-end and as such I cannot share anything.

Postulant answered 27/10, 2011 at 19:46 Comment(0)

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