[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] AJAX applications in Haskell

[Jared Updike]

> This would require to:
>
> - Retarget one of the existing Haskell compilers to generate JavaScript
> (other possible targets would be Flash or higher level UI languages such as
> OpenLaszlo that in turn compiles down to either Flash or JavaScript/HTML)

As I've noticed from experience, you can just write JavaScript itself!
(You will end up doing this a lot anyway because any library is bound
to be missing some feature you need, say, input textbox history w/
up/down keys, or, say, autoscroll to bottom of iframe when content
added, etc. as here):

  http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~lordkaos/calc.cgi

(source available here http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~lordkaos/calc.tar.gz)

> Is anyone working on anything similar or that might be interested in such a
> project?

I'm definitely interested in this. I would love to be able to deploy a
Haskell application in the web browser w/out having to drain server
computing resources. Imagine reading a Haskell tutorial and providing
interactive applications that run in the reader's browser, etc.

Also, I really would love to see something in Haskell that can compete
with the Web Services / Web Forms stuff from Visual Studio 2005/C# in
terms of simplicity and power and feature-completeness: just write
your app and it generates all the HTML/CSS/JavaScript on the client
and the XML request stuff on the serve. Perhaps in Haskell we could
have something fugdets-like but deployable in any (relatively recent)
browser w/ no downloads.

  Jared.
-- 
http://www.updike.org/~jared/
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