Re: [Haskell-cafe] Need advice: Haskell in Web Client

On 01/26/2012 11:16 AM, dokondr wrote:

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 1:37 AM, Dag Odenhallwrote:

...

On Tue, 2012-01-17 at 22:05 +0300, dokondr wrote:

...

I prefer using Turing complete PL to program web client, like the one

used

...

in GWT (Java) or Cappuccino (Objective-J). http://cappuccino.org/learn/ In this case you /almost/ don't need to know HTML, CSS, DOM, Ajax, etc. to develop WebUI and good PL lets you concentrate on problem domain instead of bothering about browser support. It is a real pity that Haskell still has no such tools to generate Web GUI in Javascript. (((

Have you seen Chris Done's posts on the subject?

http://chrisdone.com/tags/javascript.html

Thanks for the link! (Never seen this before) Ideally, I would be happy to be able to write in Haskell a complete front-end / GUI, so it could be compiled to different back-ends: Javascript to run in the Browser and also a standalone app. In Python world this is already done with Pyjamas (http://pyjs.org/) - "a Rich Internet Application (RIA) Development Platform for both Web and Desktop." Also from Pyjamas site: Pyjamas "... contains a Python-to-Javascript compiler, an AJAX framework and a Widget Set API. Pyjamas Desktop is the Desktop version of Pyjamas Pyjamas Desktop allows the exact same python web application source code to be executed as a standalone desktop application (running under Python) instead of being stuck in a Web browser."

Architecture diagram http://pyjs.org/wiki/pyjamasandpyjamasdesktop/

I wonder if somebody works on similar Haskell "Rich Internet Application (RIA) Development Platform" ? Any ideas, comments on implementation of such system in Haskell? What existing Haskell GUI libraries can be used for a desktop GUI, etc.?

Well, it's basically just proof-of-concept at the moment, and it's not really usable for real applications at the moment, but there is http://hackage.haskell.org/package/dingo-core-0.1.0 http://hackage.haskell.org/package/dingo-widgets-0.1.0 http://hackage.haskell.org/package/dingo-example-0.1.0 The basic client<->server communication, server-side state handling, etc. is there, but it's missing a couple of things before it could be used for real apps: There's no real security, and there are *very* few widgets. The few widgets that exist at the moment are also probably lacking a few operations. On the plus side, it's should be pretty easy to create new widgets. You can get a feel for how the thing looks from an application programmer's perspective by looking at the source for the example.