[Haskell-cafe] Call for GUI examples - Functional Reactive Programming

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:
> Dear Haskellers,
> 
> Can GUI programming be liberated from the IO monad? Functional Reactive 
> Programming (FRP) promises as much, and I'm trying to make this dream a 
> reality with my [reactive-banana][] library. Having released version 
> 0.4.0.0, I am now looking for example programs to direct the future 
> evolution of the library.
> 
> Do you know any *small GUI programs* that you would *like* to see 
> *implemented with Functional Reactive Programming?*

Many thanks to everyone for telling me of your examples!

I have implemented a few of them:

    http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Reactive-banana/Examples

Overall, the library held up very well, it's already perfectly usable 
for implementing GUIs in the functional reactive style. I was 
particularly surprised that I was able implement an animation, even 
though the library has no notion of time yet! The CRUD/database example 
was the most exciting; while still somewhat messy by Haskell standards, 
I quite like the result.

Concerning the future evolution of the library, I now have a better 
sense of the remaining primitive combinators that are still missing. I 
also added a few immediate improvements, like

  * MonadFix instance for NetworkDescription
  * Overloaded (<@) and (<@>) operators for the `apply` function

and uploaded a corresponding version 0.4.1.0 on Hackage

    http://hackage.haskell.org/package/reactive-banana

As said, the library is already very usable. In the future, I hope to 
implement more support for animations/audio/time; and then, only dynamic 
event switching will be left.


Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
http://apfelmus.nfshost.com