For the original question: take a look at functional reactive programming (FRP). It takes a slightly different approach to the whole GUI problem, but, I've found, obviates some of your issues. You can quickly play around with FRP and HTML UIs by using threepenny-gui and Reactive Banana. The former is a simple UI framework that lets you create and interact with HTML in Haskell, and the latter in a nice library for FRP. They work well together: http://apfelmus.nfshost.com/blog/2013/08/02-reactive-banana-threepenny.html There's a nice tutorial about FRP and Reactive Banana you can read on the Haskell Wiki. I haven't had the chance to go through it myself, but it looks promising. http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/FRP_explanation_using_reactive-banana If you're wondering about Haskell and UIs, I think FRP is the best place to look—it provides the most pleasant semantics for programming UIs that I've come across, although most of the libraries are still a bit experimental. (Implementing the exact semantics we'd like turned out to be very difficult!)
The reactive solutions complicates the problem rather than to simplify it. That means that they are not the correct paradigm.
That's a very hasty, superficial way to dismiss a whole paradigm!
FRP libraries have proven *difficult to implement*, but this does not mean
they somehow "complicate the problem". The real insight with FRP is
developing a nice semantics *for the end user* and making it simpler to
work with the libraries, at the expense of a more complex implementation.
It's a parallel to functional programming at large: we're willing to trade
complexity in GHC in return for a nicer high-level programming environment.
Formlets are an interesting concept, but they seem to be significantly more
narrow than FRP. How do formlets address continuous things like animations
or mouse movement?
Also, a lot of the examples (at least on the Haskell wiki[1]) seem pretty
amenable to FRP. How is
chooseBool :: Form Bool
chooseBool = enumRadio [(True, "Yes"), (False, "No")] True
significantly different from just providing a Behavior Bool in the spirit
of FRP?
On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 3:57 PM, Wojtek Narczyński
On 12.08.2014 00:53, Alberto G. Corona wrote:
I think that the GUI people hace to embrace the formlet concept, used in HTML interfaces sooner better than later. The GUI development has lost the train by trying to interface C libraries that are decades old. The reactive solutions complicates the problem rather than to simplify it. That means that they are not the correct paradigm.
I'm mainly interested in HTML/JS GUIs. Perhaps I should have stated it explicitly upfront.
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