
Hey, looking on the haskell homepage, there are a lot of gui libraries (or at least bindings) available. One big difference seems to be that some are based on "Functional Reactive Programming" (I do not know what that is, just read it). So if I want to write a gui in haskell, which library should I use? Which is stable enough? Has anyone experience with some of these gui libraries? Thanks! Nathan

I recently did a project with Gtk2Hs and it was fine. The binding is
pretty complete, mature and closely emulates the imperative OO style
of the GTK itself so you spend most of your time in the IO monad.
While it isn't very Haskelly, it made it very easy for me to use
documentation from other GTK bindings. For example, PyGTK docs
answered many questions that I couldn't find in the Haddocks.
Other upsides using GTK were that 1) Haskell has a nice Glade library
which made it really easy to design the GUI itself 2) Haskell's type
system even though you are mostly in the IO monad was incredibly
valuable for development.
One downside was that installing Gtk2Hs and the Glade library on
Windows was not easy. It took a little messing around and I documented
my experiences in the wiki, but it appears that those instructions
haven't worked for everybody. Once I did get it installed I did all of
my development on Linux and the code worked fine without any tweaking
on Windows.
Hope this helps!
-deech
On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Nathan Hüsken
Hey,
looking on the haskell homepage, there are a lot of gui libraries (or at least bindings) available. One big difference seems to be that some are based on "Functional Reactive Programming" (I do not know what that is, just read it).
So if I want to write a gui in haskell, which library should I use? Which is stable enough? Has anyone experience with some of these gui libraries?
Thanks! Nathan
_______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners

Hey, Thanks for your insides. I will look into Gtk2Hs. Has anyone experience with a gui toolkit based on "Functional Reactive Programming" that he/she would describe as mature and up to date? Thanks! Nathan On 05/04/2011 05:12 PM, aditya siram wrote:
I recently did a project with Gtk2Hs and it was fine. The binding is pretty complete, mature and closely emulates the imperative OO style of the GTK itself so you spend most of your time in the IO monad.
While it isn't very Haskelly, it made it very easy for me to use documentation from other GTK bindings. For example, PyGTK docs answered many questions that I couldn't find in the Haddocks.
Other upsides using GTK were that 1) Haskell has a nice Glade library which made it really easy to design the GUI itself 2) Haskell's type system even though you are mostly in the IO monad was incredibly valuable for development.
One downside was that installing Gtk2Hs and the Glade library on Windows was not easy. It took a little messing around and I documented my experiences in the wiki, but it appears that those instructions haven't worked for everybody. Once I did get it installed I did all of my development on Linux and the code worked fine without any tweaking on Windows.
Hope this helps! -deech
On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Nathan Hüsken
wrote: Hey,
looking on the haskell homepage, there are a lot of gui libraries (or at least bindings) available. One big difference seems to be that some are based on "Functional Reactive Programming" (I do not know what that is, just read it).
So if I want to write a gui in haskell, which library should I use? Which is stable enough? Has anyone experience with some of these gui libraries?
Thanks! Nathan
_______________________________________________ Beginners mailing list Beginners@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/beginners

Nathan Hüsken wrote:
Thanks for your insides. I will look into Gtk2Hs.
Has anyone experience with a gui toolkit based on "Functional Reactive Programming" that he/she would describe as mature and up to date?
All GUI toolkits based on FRP (functional reactive programming) that I know (grapefruit-gui, frantk, fruit) are still highly experimental or no longer supported. If you want something mature, I suggest you use a traditional approach like wxHaskell or Gtk2Hs instead. That said, I'm currently working on a independent FRP library that can be hooked into *any* GUI framework, including wx and gtk. http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/blog/2011/04/28-frp-banana-0-2.html In other words, you can have the best of both worlds. For example, my library grew out of a small GUI application that uses wxHaskell. https://github.com/HeinrichApfelmus/Haskell-BlackBoard Best regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com

On Wed, 04 May 2011 16:06:33 +0200, Nathan Hüsken
Hey,
looking on the haskell homepage, there are a lot of gui libraries (or at least bindings) available. One big difference seems to be that some are based on "Functional Reactive Programming" (I do not know what that is, just read it).
So if I want to write a gui in haskell, which library should I use? Which is stable enough? Has anyone experience with some of these gui libraries?
I tried Gtk2Hs a couple of years ago on my Windows PC and found a lot of serious bugs. Recently there was some discussion about problems on Mac OS X. The Gtk2Hs license is not suitable if you want to sell your software. WxHaskell works fine for me and the license is very liberal. Regards, Henk-Jan van Tuyl -- http://Van.Tuyl.eu/ http://members.chello.nl/hjgtuyl/tourdemonad.html --
participants (4)
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aditya siram
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Heinrich Apfelmus
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Henk-Jan van Tuyl
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Nathan Hüsken