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Haskell Weekly News
http://sequence.complete.org/
Issue 53 - December 12, 2006
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Welcome to issue 53 of HWN, a weekly newsletter covering developments
in the Haskell community.
Lots of new, practical Haskell libraries released this week, including
support for ogg sound file parsing, a new user interface library, ftp
clients and servers, database bindings as well as config files and
logging.
Announcements
Visual Haskell 0.2. Krasimir Angelov [1]announced the final version of
[2]Visual Haskell 0.2 is available! This is the first version that is:
available for both VStudio 2003 and VStudio 2005; distributed with a
stable GHC version (6.6). Additionally the plugin itself is much more
stable than its first 0.0 version.
1. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14608
2. http://www.haskell.org/visualhaskell
Phooey: functional user interfaces for Haskell. Conal Elliott
[3]announced Phooey, [4]a functional UI library for Haskell. GUIs are
usually programmed in an 'unnatural' style, in that implementation
dependencies are inverted, relative to logical dependencies. This
reversal results directly from the imperative orientation of most GUI
libraries. While outputs depend on inputs from a user and semantic
point of view, the imperative approach imposes an implementation
dependence of inputs on outputs. Phooey ('Phunctional ooser
ynterfaces') retains the functional style, in which outputs are
expressed in terms of inputs. In addition, Phooey supports dynamic
input bounds, flexible layout, and mutually-referential widgets. It is
[5]available via darcs.
3. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14635
4. http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/phooey/doc
5. http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/phooey
HOgg 0.2.0. Conrad Parker [6]announced HOgg 0.2.0. The [7]HOgg package
provides a commandline tool for manipulating Ogg files, and a
corresponding Haskell library. This is the initial public release. The
focus is on correctness of Ogg parsing and production. The
capabilities of the hogg commandline tool are roughly on par with
those of the [8]oggz* tools, although hogg does not yet provide an
equivalent to oggz-validate. HOgg supports chained and multiplexed Ogg
bitstreams conformant with [9]RFC3533. HOgg can parse headers for
CMML, FLAC, OggPCM, Speex, Theora and Vorbis media codecs, and can
read and write Ogg Skeleton bitstreams.
6. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cafe/17102
7. http://snapper.kfish.org/~conrad/software/hogg/
8. http://www.annodex.net/software/liboggz/index.html
9. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3533.txt
10. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14610
ftphs. John Goerzen [10]announced ftphs, [11]an FTP client and server
library for Haskell. Its features include: easy to use operation; full
support of text and binary transfers; optional lazy interaction;
server can serve up a real or a virtual filesystem tree; Standards
compliant. ftphs was previously a part of the MissingH library. The
code in this release is unchanged from its state in MissingH, other
than the changes necessary to make it a standalone package.
11. http://software.complete.org/ftphs
AnyDBM 1.0.0. John Goerzen [12]announced AnyDBM, a generic DBM-type
interface. [13]AnyDBM provides a generic infrastructure for supporting
storage of hash-like items with String-to-String mappings. It can be
used for in-memory or on-disk storage. Two simple backend drivers are
included with this package: one that is RAM-only, and one that is
persistent and disk-backed. The hdbc-anydbm package provides another
driver, which lets you use simple tables in any SQL database to
provide a DBM-like interface. MissingPy also provides a Python driver
which lets you use any Python anydbm driver under Haskell AnyDBM.
12. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14613
13. http://software.complete.org/anydbm
ConfigFile 1.0.0. John Goerzen [14]announced ConfigFile, a parser and
writer for handling sectioned config files in Haskell. The
[15]ConfigFile module works with configuration files in a standard
format that is easy for the user to edit, easy for the programmer to
work with, yet remains powerful and flexible. It is inspired by, and
compatible with, Python's ConfigParser module. It uses files that
resemble Windows .INI-style files, but with numerous improvements.
14. http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14612
15. http://software.complete.org/configfile
hslogger. John Goerzen [16]announced hslogger, a logging framework for
Haskell. [17]hslogger's features include: each log message has a
priority and a
