[Haskell-cafe] dsl and gui toolkit

Andrew U. Frank frank at geoinfo.tuwien.ac.at
Tue Oct 6 12:22:30 EDT 2009


thanks for the connection to the gui runner - it is interesting and worthwile, 
but a different approach. my approach is strictly declarative and does not 
describe sequences of process. it describes screens and links operations to 
buttons. then it takes inputs from the screen and runs the operations and 
posts the result on the screen. some operations open new screens etc.

i started with the idea that ontologies describe the semantics of data in a 
static way; this should be (nearly) enough to create the user interface - 
which is all about semantics of the data.
of course, you have to include in the ontology the semantics of the operations 
(as class with functions). 

the implementation is close to a reactive framework - adding a representation 
of all what is visible on the screen (the universer of discourse) in a format 
usable by the operations. then you have only to connect this 'universe of 
discourse' to the programs which operate on the data and post their reaction 
in the UoD and map the UoD to the screen 

the details are messy as i attempted to construct the internal data structures 
etc. as automatically as possible and with minimal designer input

I did not use template haskell, yet, but will need to (i think).

i am happy to share it with interested parties and hear the comments and 
perhaps somebody can help me with using templates to reduce the . it is IMHO 
not yet ready for posting in a library - but this is certainly the goal. 


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