[GUI] Future of Haskell: GUI development

[Axel Simon]

On Sunday, Sep 14, 2003, at 17:22 Europe/Paris, Nick Name wrote:

> Alle 17:05, domenica 14 settembre 2003, Manuel M T Chakravarty ha
> scritto:
>> What makes you think that the few people in the Haskell
>> community who are interested in building GUI infrastructure
>> can do a better job at a cross-platform API than the masses
>> of GUI developers for whom this is their daily bread?
>
> I agree with you on this point, that we were wrong designing everything
> from scratch, but instead:
>
Although the idea is kinda dead now, I object to Manuel that we wanted 
to reinvent wxWindows. We never meant to build an API that covers 
everything from every platform. But even wxWindows doesn't cover 
everything. So I think it would be useful if we can provide a way to 
extract native handles, so that you can plug in a QuickTime widget on 
Apple and a media player COM object on Windows. I guess this is what 
Vincenzo suggested as well:

>
> - be able to make a quick binding to other libraries like qt or dialog
> directly in haskell, if there ever is a qt or dialog binding for
> haskell of course.


>> I think we are better off by piggy-backing on a major
>> cross-platform effort driven by a large developer community
>> than by wasting our time on trying to solve problems that
>> the experts couldn't crack so far.
>
> What about just taking wxwin, feature by feature, and give it a more
> haskell-like view? (note that this has to be done anyway, and that Daan
> is doing just that alone). This means
[..]
I think it would be very interesting to port Fudgets to wxWindows and 
see if people are able to use it and find it easier than the IO Monad 
approach. Actually, what Vincenzo suggested quite some time ago about 
streams is exactly what Fudgets are about. I don't think there is a use 
of an abstraction over the whole of wxWindows at the level of the IO 
Monad. But

> - reuse the design decisions of wxwin in the large, but be able to make
> minor changes like adjusting the menu layout of macosx

, since the MacOS menu bar is important and maybe should be enforced by 
the API of wxHaskell.


Axel.