haskell newbie seeking for advice

[Iavor Diatchki]

hi,

Jose A.Ortega Ruiz wrote:
> hi all,
> 
> as stated in the subject, i'm a newcomer to haskell programming: i've
> read some tutorials and (portions of) a couple of books and am really
> fascinated with the language. but my haskell coding experience is
> limited to toy programs and short exercises. so i decided to try my
> hand at a small project to really learn haskell and the functional
> programming mindset[1], and i would appreciate to hear your opinions
> and comments on some issues before i start coding:
> 
> - build toolchain. i'm used to the autoconfig/automake/make tools for
>   C/C++ projects, and to ant for Java stuff. what do haskellers use?
>   my initial thought was using a plain Makefile with ghc, but there is
>   also hmake and maybe other tools i am missing. what would you use? [2]
ghc --make is also quite useful (the ghc documentation is at: 
haskell.org/ghc).

> - graphics toolkit. one of my programs will be a GUI. there seems to
>   be a lot of choice here: gtk2hs looks nice (as used in hircules) and
>   fudgets seems to have a pretty interesting and well-documented
>   architecture (which covers also client/server programming: i'll be
>   using a client/server architecture too) but its widgets are uglier
>   and look alien in current linux desktops. i'd like to have a
>   fudgets-gtk framework of sorts :) and then, there is htoolkit,
>   Object I/O and whatnot... any recommendations?
this is a tough one...  i think most of the libraries have some quircks. 
  there are a few recent attempts to get a good library going, but i 
haven't had a chance to try them (the latest as far as i know are 
wxHaskell and hToolkit).  i have a bit of experience with fudgets and it 
works.  it is however getting a bit old (hence the funny look, and 
programming it is sometimes a bit weird).  it would be nice to have a 
new fudgets, but it seems like a rather large task.

> - TCP/IP stuff. i will have a client/server architecture with TCP/IP
>   as the transport protocol. other than fudgets, i'm not aware of any
>   haskell framework for IPC: am i missing something?
ghc has a bunch of libraries for networking.  they are a bit low level, 
but if you are used to writing networking applications in C, they are 
fine (and perhaps better).  see the library documentation of ghc.

> - XML. i'll be handling XML documents, and HaXml seems to me an
>   excellent candidate to cover this area, but, of course, i'm very
>   interested in hearing of alternatives...
never used any of those.


-- 
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| Iavor S. Diatchki, Ph.D. student               |
| Department of Computer Science and Engineering |
| School of OGI at OHSU                          |
| http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~diatchki               |
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