[Haskell-cafe] FRP question

[Ryan Ingram]

I think FRP is well-suited to this problem; it lets you abstract out
the imperative network code from the "reactive core" of the code.  The
network code can live in a separate thread that uses select() and
listen(), and updates event streams.

I was thinking about writing a MUD using FRP; in my mind, the
framework looked something like this:

-- A connection is
-- 1) An event that fires once when the connection is closed
-- 2) An event that fires each time a line is received over the connection
-- 3) A routine that outputs a line to that connection
-- 4) A routine that closes the conection
data Connection = Conn
   { connClosed :: Event ()
   , connLines :: Event String
   , connWrite :: String -> IO ()
   , connDisconnect :: IO ()
   }

-- Listen on a given port for connections and return them as an FRP
event stream.
-- Since Connection contains an event stream, this is going
-- to be a nested event; we will use join/>>= on Event at some point to get the
-- commands from each connection
listen :: Int -> IO (Event Connection)

-- the server is an FRP program that outputs an event stream of IO actions;
-- the actions will generally just be "write a message to a particular socket"
server :: Event Connection -> Event (IO ())

-- Now main is trivial to implement, given sinkE from Conal's FRP paper
-- http://conal.net/papers/simply-reactive/
-- sinkE :: (a -> IO ()) -> Event a -> IO ()
main = listen 4200 >>= sinkE id . server

-- An example server that writes "hello world" to each client and
disconnects them
server conns = do
   connection <- conns
   return $ do
       connWrite connection "Hello World."
       connDisconnect connection

  -- ryan

On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 2:26 PM, Tim Newsham <newsham at lava.net> wrote:
> I'm interested in FRP, have read several of the papers and am wondering
> if it could be applied to writing multi-client server programs.
> What would be the input type events for such a system?  What would
> be the output type events?  How would the system handle the fact
> that it has to multiplex several IO streams (sockets)?
>
> I'm trying to answer these questions myself and having a hard time.
> Should input events include new connection requests and shutdowns?
> Individual bytes?  Streams of bytes?  or higher level PDUs?
> What kind of output should be generated?  Full PDUs?  streams of
> bytes?  Pairs of (connection identifier,data)?
> How would such a system effectively hide the multiplexed IO going on?
> Is this sort of problem poorly suited for FRP?
>
> Tim Newsham
> http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/
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