On 27 Jan, 2013, at 16:52 , Heinrich Apfelmus <apfel...@quantentunnel.de> wrote:
>> >> Although I think many GUI's will (eventually) run via a browser, >> I also think there is a place for standalone (i.e. non client/server) >> apps with a responsive interface with many bells & whistles. >> In other words, until the time browser based GUI's like ji >> are a reality wxHaskell (and/or gtk2hs) will have to do the job. > > Oh, I agree completely that desktop applications are still relevant. > What I mean to say is just that the Haskell ecosystem currently does not > really offer a low-cost and portable way to make simple GUI applications > and I think that the browser could fill that niche. In other words, I'm > thinking about the "I just want a button" desire, I don't really care > that it's in the browser. > > Both WxHaskell and Gtk2Hs are barely maintained and hard to install. I > have gotten so many emails from people that tried and failed to install > wxHaskell in order to check out my reactive-banana-wx package. Another Maintenance of wxHaskell also is hard because wxWidgets evolves (there are many uses of deprecated interfaces) and the wxdirect tool FFI interfaces to a (manually written) wrapper C library, not to the wxWdigets C++ .h files themselves. It probably would be worthwhile to look at http://hackage.haskell.org/package/cgen, used for OGRE interfacing (http://codeflow.wordpress.com/2011/01/03/wrapping-c-libraries-for-haskell/). More general, I think we might want to be able to extract FFI info from more C-like languages: yesterday C, today C++, tomorrow Javascript, depending to what languages Haskell compilers are going to compile to. > example is the hp2any suite for analyzing GHC performance profiles. > Unfortunately, I can't use it, because I didn't manage to install Gtk2Hs > on my OS X machine. Also, Conal Elliott once remarked that he has > stopped working on his legendary graphical tool ideas because the GUI > library situation was rather bleak. > > I think there is a considerable market for a low effort GUI thing that > works everywhere. It doesn't have to be great, but I think we're missing > out on a lot of brilliant GUI ideas that can't come to fruition because > Haskell doesn't have a very simple GUI framework. I agree. In terms of a design I'd very much like such a GUI to be a subset of wx (i.e. that which is easily mappable onto (e.g.) jquery), make such a subset be available in the form of a FRP friendly class, say WXBasicAPI, so multiple GUI backends can be provided. The logic can then be programmed using a FRP library (using your reactive-banana did work out pretty well), with sources/sinks expressed in terms of WXBasicAPI. A web based GUI could be done along the lines of both ji and mentioned Modular-Haskell-GUI. The latter also uses websockets which allows for more efficient, non-polling communication. Regretfully the Modular-Haskell-GUI experiment did not reach the point of working & usable & properly documented, but ideas of it can be used. > >> For some more ji like experiments see also: >> >> https://github.com/bertm/Modular-Haskell-GUI >> https://github.com/UU-ComputerScience/js-asteroids (using UHC) >> >> The idea in the latter was to offer a wxHaskell implementation >> minimally using code behind a FFI, therefore avoiding as much as >> possible maintenance of a non-Haskell codebase. If not done that (or >> similar) way we will still end up in a similar situation as is the case >> with wxHaskell, i.e. reliance on C++ (or Javascript) code. > > Nice, these projects look promising and definitely more mature than Ji. > What happened to Modular-Haskell-GUI? There's a paper draft in the > repository, but I haven't seen it published anywhere. regards, - Atze - Atze Dijkstra, Department of Information and Computing Sciences. /|\ Utrecht University, PO Box 80089, 3508 TB Utrecht, Netherlands. / | \ Tel.: +31-30-2534118/1454 | WWW : http://www.cs.uu.nl/~atze . /--| \ Fax : +31-30-2513971 .... | Email: a...@uu.nl ............... / |___\ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_d2d_jan _______________________________________________ wxhaskell-devel mailing list wxhaskell-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wxhaskell-devel
