Demo Proposal: Making Web Applications - XSafe

Simple is a web framework for Haskell. Simple came out of our work on Hails, a platform for secure web applications. For Hails, we needed a flexible web framework that uses no unsafe language features and can be used to build apps outside the IO monad. Unlike many mainstream web frameworks, Simple does not enforce a particular structure or paradigm. Instead, it simply provides a set of composable building blocks to help developers structure and organize their web applications. We've used Simple to build both traditional web applications as well as applications with explicit, strong safety and security guarantees. In the demonstration, we'll focus on the former - introducing the framework and motivating it's utility for traditional web apps - and show how we can leverage the LIO information flow control library to add mandatory security policies to apps.