[web-devel] The promising world of Monadic formlets

[Alberto G. Corona]

I don´t know how, but the google mail has changed the applicative functor
operator after (,) Left and Rigth by  "<-".




2013/6/19 Alberto G. Corona <agocorona at gmail.com>

> Hi,
>
> This is just to let you know the promising results of some experimentation:
>
> Formlets are about applicative instances, but what about monadic
> instances? What a Monad instance of formlets means? I recently experimented
> with this and the results are very interesting and powerful- It mixes the
> best of web forms, with the flexibility of console applications. ???!!!!!!
>
>
> Althoug this example is for the formlets of the MFlow
> <https://github.com/agocorona/MFlow>framework , it can be ported to other
> formlet implementations. Although the MFLow formlets include web formatting
> that is not supported in other formlets implementations. Static HTML
> templating don´t work well with monadic formlets, so it is important to
> include the formatting as a  part of the computation:
>
> import MFlow.Wai.Blaze.Html.All
>
> dynamicForm= wform $ do
>       (n,s) <- (,) <- p << "Who are you?"
>                    ++> getString Nothing  <! hint "name"     <++ br
>                    <*> getString Nothing  <! hint "surname"  <++ br
>                    <** submitButton "ok" <++ br
>
>       flag <- b << "do you " ++> getRadio[radiob "work?",radiob "study?"]
> <++ br
>
>       r<-case flag of
>          "work" -> pageFlow "l"
>                      $ Left  <- b << "do you enjoy your work? "
>                                 ++> getBool True "yes" "no"
>                                 <** submitButton "ok"  <++ br
>
>          "study"-> pageFlow "r"
>                      $ Right <- b << "do you study in "
>                                   ++> getRadio[radiob "University"
>                                          ,radiob "High School"]
>
>       p << ("You are "++n++" "++s) ++>
>        case r of
>          Left fl ->   p << ("You work and it is " ++ show fl ++ " that you
> enjoy your work")
>                         ++> noWidget
>
>          Right stu -> p << ("You study at the " ++ stu)
>                         ++> noWidget
>
>
> hint s= [("placeholder",s)]
> onClickSubmit= [("onclick","this.form.submit()")]
> radiob s n= text s ++> setRadio s n <! onClickSubmit
>
> Here wform, getBool, getString , getRadio etc are formlet elements
>
> The first sentence is an applicative composition that generate a 2 tuple,
> to show that applicative and monadic can be mixed.  the operations ++> add
> html to the formlet. the operatior <! add attributes to the formlet
> element.. noWidget is a dumb formlet that does not validate.
>
> The second monadic statement is an election between two options. The
> beauty of the monadic instance is that the rest of the form can vary
> depending on the previous answers.  Since the formlets validate the input,
> unless the election is made, the radio will not validate, so the monadic
> execution will be aborted beyond any unanswered question, so nothing will
> appear after the question. The rest of the form will appear when the user
> choose one of the two options. once one or the other option is chosen, then
> another binary question is presented. (either he likes his work or where he
> study).  When the questions are finised, the results are presented.
> I hope that you get the idea. The benefit is not only the familiar coding
> and presentation of a sequential console application: Since the form
> encloses all the fields, At any time the user can change previous inputs
> and the form will reflect these changes. For example if the user change
> from work to study (second statements) the "where do you study will appear
> and the work related questions and answers will disappear. That is
> wonderfully useful for heavily interactive applications.
>
> There is  a problem however and it is the issue of the formlet
> identifiers. Unlike in an applicative presentation, now the number and type
> of the formlets will vary, so the response to a previous form create a new
> kind of form, and the post response can be misinterpreted. To avoid that ,
> the  pageFlow call creates fixed field labels for each branch of execution.
>
> I will release a version of MFlow that support this kind of monadic
> composition of fomlets, but In essence it is nothing but to add Monad
> instance to formlets. A single server procedure, that executes the formlet
> code can support all the interaction so any framework can do it. The
> usability of that is huge:It is possible to interact in a web page in a
> console style with questions and answers with the versatitly of a dynamic
> foms: Any modification in the form change the subsequent flow of
> interaction. Another application of this monadic style is to ease multistep
> processes such are registration, check-out and payment ad so on. Even a
> entire interactive dynamic application can be coded in a single page.
>
> And no javascript is needed!.
>
>
> To run this formlet in MFlow:
>
> main=do
>   addMessageFlows
>        [(""    , transient $ runFlow  $ ask dynamicForm )]
>
>    wait $ run port waiMessageFlow
>
>
> This video show how the presentation of this example vary with the user
> input:
>
> http://youtu.be/DryBQc9agFg
>
>
> I hope that you find the idea interesting.  If you want to experiment
> with this in MFlow, I have to say that the implementation of this feature
> is in an early stage. The code is in the head branch
>
> https://github.com/agocorona/MFlow/tree/head
>
>
>
> Alberto.
>



-- 
Alberto.
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