This is the first of a new series from Scarf: Project Spotlights. In each post, we’ll highlight an exciting open source project and the problems the developers are solving, how they are commercializing the project (if applicable), and how they are leveraging Scarf.
The first project spotlight: IHP, from digitally induced.
IHP is a modern batteries-included Haskell web framework, built on top of Haskell and Nix. It brings everything web developers need to build large-scale web applications.
IHP offers a variety of great features to provide a great out-of-the-box experience:
- State-of-the-art type safety from on the backend with Haskell, and on the frontend with HSX (think React’s JSX but in Haskell)
- Web-GUI-based tooling - From schema design to auto-generation of models, routes, and more, IHP takes care of all the boilerplate.
- Server-side components
- Auto reloading
- Robust auth built-in
What we love about IHP
If you’re already familiar with Scarf, you may know that our engineering team adores Haskell. It’s the primary language our backend is built with, and its design philosophies (eg, type safety & correctness) pervade our stack. IHP is quickly becoming the Ruby on Rails of the functional programming world, filling a burning need in an ecosystem we care deeply about.
IHP is also prioritizing being accessible to non-Haskell developers. Haskell’s adoption has historically suffered from the steep learning curve to achieve productivity in day-to-day web development. We’re excited to see the impact of lowering the barrier of entry for anyone to get quickly get started and get their work done; IHP has a chance to significantly improve Haskell’s newcomer story.
In addition to Haskell, our team also relies heavily on the Nix package manager. IHP leverages Nix very effectively - the entire dependency chain, even down to the database, is managed by Nix. This means that every developer on your team is pulling down the exact same dependencies, byte for byte, eliminating an entire class of developer tooling issues. Your builds are truly reproducible, and getting a development environment started is dead simple, consistently.
Commercializing IHP
According to Marc Scholten, the founder of digitally induced & the lead developer of IHP:
“We’ve recently introduced the IHP developer subscription, a paid version of IHP targeted at developers working with IHP in a professional context. We believe for IHP to be successful in the long term it needs to have a sustainable business model. Following the open-core model, we have the basic open-source edition and multiple paid plans for professionals, companies, and enterprises."
How digitally induced is leveraging Scarf
IHP’s main installable artifact is hosted via Scarf Gateway. Marc provides more details:
“As we’ve just started with the commercialization it’s important for us to understand who is using IHP. Before using Scarf we’ve mostly relied on the data set of existing customers.
It only took us a couple of minutes to integrate the Scarf Gateway. With Scarf, we now understand much more about the new users starting their journey into IHP. For example, we learned that the US is the strongest country in terms of new installs. As a company based in Germany that’s pretty good to know.
We’ve invited everyone interested into our Scarf dashboard and now we’re regularly using the numbers in our marketing meeting.
With Scarf, we can also better understand what large companies & enterprises are using IHP. This will be a very valuable asset for us in the future when we launch the enterprise plan.”
What’s coming up next for IHP
The digitally induced team is gearing up to ship IHP’s v1 release by the end of the year!
Learning more
Check out the IHP homepage: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/
Star IHP on GitHub: https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp
See IHP’s commercial offerings: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/Pricing
Follow digitally induced on Twitter: https://twitter.com/digitallyinduce