I think you mean, "Snap is pretty much the same as Happstack", since Happstack came first, and Snap borrowed many ideas from it.
I would tell Snap users they should use Happstack because we have a shiny 3D graphic on our homepage. That is based on my in-depth research which indicates that many people decided to use Snap because it had the prettiest homepage. :)
I didn't mean to imply happstack copied snap, but rather that my perception of happstack as "weird" was wrong and it is actually pretty much the same. The sales pitch request wasn't hypothetical, we've only been using snap for a little while and I actually am interested in any advantages happstack may offer.
Well, there is no bad choice when it comes to picking a Haskell web framework. They are more alike than they are different. Anything you could develop in one, you could develop in another. There are certainly no magic bullets in any of the frameworks.
There are certainly many minor design decisions that you can compare. For example, last time I looked at Snap, it seemed like variables captured from the url, got mixed into the same environment as key/value pairs from the QUERY_STRING and POST data. And, they explicitly decided to provide only a Snap monad, but not a SnapT monad transformer. But, none of those are, in themselves, things that warrant switching.
You could also consider which technologies the frameworks embrace, such as Heist vs HSX. At the same time, heist is officially supported by happstack (and even documented in the crash course). A lot of the core technology like acid-state, heist, hsx, jmacro, persistent, etc, can be used with any of the frameworks.
It mostly comes down to picking the framework that is investing the future you think is most exciting.
So, if the Happstack Philosophy and Roadmap get you excited, then use Happstack. If you think Snap's vision of tomorrow is more exciting -- then use Snap.
> Last time I looked at Snap, it seemed like variables captured from the url, got mixed into the same environment as key/value pairs from the QUERY_STRING and POST data.
I would tell Snap users they should use Happstack because we have a shiny 3D graphic on our homepage. That is based on my in-depth research which indicates that many people decided to use Snap because it had the prettiest homepage. :)