This is a great idea! IMO this is also one of the main ways that GUI-based apps are likely to evolve into in the future. Cross-platform GUIs are a pain in the butt in _any_ language (possibly excluding full language platforms like Java/.NET, and I'll bet even those were a nightmare for the original implementors). Mike aditya siram wrote:

Yes Haskell is not strong on the GUI end of things but have you considered turning your desktop app into a web app? I've done this for a few things and really enjoyed the process. Haskell's STM is what makes this so nice.

Basically the you start a Haskell service on port <some-large-number> and make AJAX calls to it from your web browser using a CGI script as a go-between. In my case all data flows back and forth as JSON objects. You could just as easily use XML.

For the front-end I used Qooxdoo [1] , an absolutely gorgeous well-documented Javascript GUI framework but there are plenty to choose from.

This has a couple of advantages, it encourages MVC by letting the front-end take care of UI and the back-end does the logic and holds state. It's easy to deploy- Javascript runs everywhere and so does Haskell (the non-GUI parts anyway!). And it looks uniform across platforms.

The disadvantages include security (but you can always restrict users to localhost), and performance (you probably don't want to visualize gigabyte size datasets in your browser). Additionally you now need to add and configure an extra piece of software, namely the web-server. Also you now have to learn Javascript and add that to the list of things the maintenance programmer has to worry about. But if you can learn Haskell, Javascript shouldn't be an issue. I've found that none of these disadvantages are really show-stoppers.

hth, deech

[1] http://qooxdoo.org/

On 4/2/10, gladstein@gladstein.com wrote:

...

As a working engineer, one of my greatest frustrations is my inability to use Haskell in the workplace. The unfortunate fact is that my media industry clients use mostly Windows, some Macs, and no linux except for servers. The core system works everywhere, but many contributed libraries don't. GUIs are the big showstopper.

One of the reasons Java won out over Common Lisp is that it had huge libraries. Franz's libraries were superb but few in number. One diehard Lisp user converted his lab to Java because "Java gives you everything you want, for free."

That languages are distinct from their libraries escapes a lot of people; they see each language as a package. I met a COBOL programmer recently (I'm not making this up) that was looking into Java. He didn't see how people could use it, he said, because it had "thousands of commands".

I'll stop whining now.

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Cocoa is probably the best GUI toolkit (open-source or otherwise) that I've seen. However it ties your app to the Mac (and the iPhone). And I don't believe there is a mature Haskell bridge. Cross-platform GUI's like GTK don't look as nice but functions pretty well for what they do. Unfortunately they are written in C/C++/. Integration to Haskell is pretty nice but it seems like a bear to install on Windows or Mac and hence there are deployment issues. Until a cross-platform Haskell GUI toolkit is sufficiently mature, that doesn't leave many options and all of them require spending time coding in another language. If natively running code was a major requirement, I'd use a Java Swing app as a client connecting to Haskell server - if not I'd go with a web frontend as previously described. And Javascript [1] is really not _that_ bad! -deech [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0596517742 On 4/3/10, Heinrich Apfelmus wrote:

Michael Vanier wrote:

...

aditya siram wrote:

...

Yes Haskell is not strong on the GUI end of things but have you considered turning your desktop app into a web app? I've done this for a few things and really enjoyed the process. Haskell's STM is what makes this so nice.

This is a great idea! IMO this is also one of the main ways that GUI-based apps are likely to evolve into in the future. Cross-platform GUIs are a pain in the butt in _any_ language (possibly excluding full language platforms like Java/.NET, and I'll bet even those were a nightmare for the original implementors).

This is a bad idea! :) As a long term Mac user, I have a strong dislike for web applications that try to be desktop applications. Sagemath is probably an example in point. Not only are the well-designed standard GUI elements thrown out of the window (the menu bar, it belongs at the top), it's also sluggish to navigate between pages, doesn't support drag & drop from other applications and most importantly, doesn't play nice with local files.

...

From the programmers point of view, I don't want to code my GUI in Javascript either, I want to do it in Haskell.

Regards, Heinrich Apfelmus

-- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com

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I'm building a desktop application using Haskell for the logic and Qt/C++ for the GUI (the haskell source is foreign-exported into a shared library). It's been hard to pull off, but it works quite well when you get past the compilation issues. Question to the Mac users on the list: do you find that Qt applications feel "native enough" on your platform ? If not, any tips ? 2010/4/3 Heinrich Apfelmus

Michael Vanier wrote:

...

aditya siram wrote:

...

Yes Haskell is not strong on the GUI end of things but have you considered turning your desktop app into a web app? I've done this for a few things and really enjoyed the process. Haskell's STM is what makes this so nice.

This is a great idea! IMO this is also one of the main ways that GUI-based apps are likely to evolve into in the future. Cross-platform GUIs are a pain in the butt in _any_ language (possibly excluding full language platforms like Java/.NET, and I'll bet even those were a nightmare for the original implementors).

This is a bad idea! :) As a long term Mac user, I have a strong dislike for web applications that try to be desktop applications. Sagemath is probably an example in point. Not only are the well-designed standard GUI elements thrown out of the window (the menu bar, it belongs at the top), it's also sluggish to navigate between pages, doesn't support drag & drop from other applications and most importantly, doesn't play nice with local files.

...

From the programmers point of view, I don't want to code my GUI in Javascript either, I want to do it in Haskell.

Regards, Heinrich Apfelmus

-- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com

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