ucspi-hs

UCSPI, or the Unix Client-Server Program Interface, is a general interface designed for writing clients and servers over some network interface. For a given protocol xproto, there should exist xprotoserver and xprotoclient applications which handle accepting and connecting to hosts, respectively, before executing some Unix application. This is a (very small!) library to make writing such applications simpler in Haskell.

One advantage to writing applications to the UCSPI interface is that it becomes trivial to change the underlying network protocol being used without modifying the application itself, by switching (for example) from tcpserver to sslserver. Another is that very small, clean network services can be written using these interfaces, because the network-handling code is abstracted away.

Sample Client

A client which sends a single line to the server, receives a line back, prints it to stdout, and exits looks like

import Network.UCSPI (ucspiClient)
import System.IO (hGetLine, hPutStrLn)

main :: IO ()
main = ucspiClient $ \ _ rdH wrH -> do
  hPutStrLn wrH "hello"
  ln <- hGetLine rdH
  putStrLn ln

To test this with a TCP connection, use tcpclient:

tcpclient 127.0.0.1 9999 runhaskell sampleclient.hs

Sample Server

A server which receives a line from the client and sends back the same line before closing the connection looks like

import Network.UCSPI (ucspiServer)

main :: IO ()
main = ucspiServer $ \ _ -> getLine >>= putStrLn

To test this with a TCP connection, use tcpserver

tcpserver 127.0.0.1 9999 runhaskell sampleserver.hs