At IHP we've been using Algora for a while now and it works really great. Here's e.g. one PR that was merged last week with a bounty attached https://github.com/digitallyinduced/ihp/issues/1621 Everything was set up in less than 15 minutes and ioannis and zafer have been super helpful with any questions we had.
In general I think this is a good direction and an interesting take on the open question around sustainable open source. Congrats on the launch and keep up the great work! :)
Cachix manages the prebuilt binaries used by IHP. If you don't install Cachix, nix will compile a lot of IHP's dependencies from scratch. This takes a long while and is not recommended.
If you're interested in building web apps with Haskell, check out IHP. IHP is the Laravel/Rails/Django of the Haskell world. Might be a more pragmatic way to get into Haskell than SchoolOfHaskell
The IDE is mostly designed as an extension to an editor heavy workflow (e.g. I use Sublime + VIM to build IHP itself). So it's unlikely to work well with a Chromebook. A workaround might be to use the GitPod integration for a web based code editor.
The IDE is btw entirely optional and everything can be done via code. E.g. all operations done via the visual Schema Designer are saved in the Application/Schema.sql file. That file can be edited from a code editor as you want. All operations in the schema designer operate on the AST of the parsed Schema.sql file.
Yes, you can get pretty far without knowing anything about Haskell. Once you've something on the screen you'll eventually get to learn a bit more about functional programming and Haskell.
IHP is really easy to package with nix nowadays. In fact the official docker building also just uses `pkgs.dockerTools.buildImage` and calls nix-build :) Most people with nix experience can easily figure out how to do exactly the same thing as the "official" way.
We've not changed our minds on docker becoming a free feature eventually. We just didn't update the pricing yet, but this is planned for the near future.
Just to clarify: The basic version of IHP is free and open source. The IHP Pro subscription is only if you want some closed source features.
IHP users that built business critical apps with IHP actually liked it very much that we've introduced the subscription. It gives people more confidence that the framework will still be there in the longterm future.
IHP actually provides a `cs` (cs as an abbrev for convertString) function that is always in scope. With that function you can easily convert between all different string types.
Check out the docs for email confirmation here: https://ihp.digitallyinduced.com/Guide/authentication.html#e... You'll see that most parts of the confirmation workflow actually happen inside your application. Only the actual controller implementation is part of IHP pro, and it's just 20 lines of code. So you can easy implement this yourself.
Generally IHP uses a lot of standard libraries of the Haskell ecosystem. So you can always break out of IHP when things don't work. It's not much more lock in than other frameworks in the space :)
We don't have a comparable ecosystem yet, but IHP uses many popular Haskell libraries under the hood. So many normal Haskell libraries integrate very well, as the underlying data structures are always exposed. Functional programs compose well in general due to it's stateless nature, that helps as well.
IHP also comes with a lot of things you'd typically use external packages for (e.g. Auth).
In general the IHP experience is very different from other Haskell web frameworks and much more batteries included, so a lot of apps typically don't need any external packages at all.
IHP is basically the rails/laravel/django of Haskell. If you haven't tried Haskell before or think Haskell is only about monads and math, give it a try and be surprised :)