On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 6:35 PM, Daniel Cook
Hi,
Someone has written a large Java library (QuickFIX/J) which speaks a gnarled, ugly protocol (FIX). There don't appear to be any FIX protocol libraries in Hackage. I need my Haskell program to talk to a 3rd-party system that only speaks FIX.
Should I:
a) Reimplement the protocol directly Haskell? (This appears to be non-trivial)
b) Wrap the Java library with some code to use a lightweight message queue (zeromq) to send messages to my Haskell program? (This would require essentially re-implementing an abstracted subset of the the protocol into 0MQ messages)
c) Find a way for Haskell to interact directly with Java? (the various JNI bridges seem very unmaintained...)
Are you referring to projects like these? * lambdaVM: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~bja8464/lambdavm/ * EclipseFP uses (or used, I'm not sure) a bridge between Java/Haskell. I doubt these approaches are very mature for general purpose work. They probably work well for the author's original purpose, but perhaps you'd run into low level bugs using them yourself. I assume they use Java's JNI and connect that to Haskell FFI. I don't know why this would be a necessarily hard problem. Haskell's FFI is very nice for talking to C, but perhaps Java's JNI is not as friendly. I would probably start by writing a JNI wrapper around QuickFIX to expose it to C and C-like languages. Then I would write a Haskell FFI binding to that library. In this way, C will become your glue language as odd as that may sound. As a longer term solution, having a combinator library for FIX in Haskell sounds really nice. I don't need it personally, but it just seems like the way to go. The drawback here is that you will have to duplicate a lot of effort to keep your implementation in sync with the de facto implementation. On the other hand, depending on the nature of the technical hurdles your Haskell implementation may be significantly easier to maintain and could possibly end up serving as a concise, correct, reference implementation when the FIX specification changes. It's also possible that some Haskell compiler, such as YHC, would serve well here. Maybe it's easier to modify that in the way lambdaVM is a modification to GHC. If I recall correctly, YHC had a backend for JavaScript at one point. That makes me think it has a very hackable backend. Another possibility that tends to work very well is to use Haskell to define a domain specific language. Your DSL could generate Java source that uses QuickFIX directly. You get the strength of using the de facto tool chain for your production binaries, the power of Haskell for language design, and the expressive power that comes from having a domain specific language. This solution is also cheaper than it might sound. You start with combinators that build up Java expressions and go from there. It's hard for me to say which is best without knowing more about the programs you'll be writing. Sounds like an interesting project! Good luck, Jason