Hi, As I see some increasing interest to the Javascript backend I am developing, first of all I would like to thank everybody who contacted me on this matter. I would like to give a clarification on the project's current status, and usability of the documentation that is available on Haskell Wiki. 1. History and status of the project. The project was "officially" started about 1.5 years ago. In November 2006, the first public announcement was made, with so called "Echo Demo Program" presented. Since then, a work was done on improvement of Javascript generation from Core, and also on low-level support of DOM which was achieved by automatic conversion of slightly patched IDL specifications available from the Web Consortium. Currently DOM Level2 is supported; Level1 was imported earlier, but all higher level functionality is added with respect to Level 2; usage of Level 1 is discouraged. After low-level interfaces with Javascript and DOM were settled, some experiments were carried out to test various programming paradigms for the high level interfaces with understanding that direct DOM manipulation differs little from usage of Javascript itself. Finally, from several concepts existing for Haskell GUI, some programming paradigm was distilled out, which is currently being worked on under the name of "Haskell Web Toolkit". At the moment, this is considered that the paradigm choice has been finalized, and the project is in the stage of proper documenting and polishing of the existing code, and creation of the widget library for practical use. Some examples could be seen in the recently published demo program at http://darcs.haskell.org/yhc/web/jsdemos/HsWTKDemo.html . 2. Available documentation Over the course of development, some draft documentation was published on the Haskell Wiki. As the coding approaches changed, parts of this documentation might have become partially or completely incorrect. I am now working on putting this in order, and for the time being I'd like to give some clarifications re garding existing documentation's usability. Brief Overview http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Javascript/Brief_overview This is a very general description, and its statements still hold. Users Guide http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Javascript/Users_guide The "Downloading" and "Build prerequisites" sections are correct. Same about "Building on Unix/Windows". "What is installed": now much more is installed, but general directory structure remains the same. "Compiling Haskell to Core", "Converting Core into Javascript", and "Building a XHTML Page" still valid in general, but see http://www.golubovsky.org/repos/wsptest/Makefile for better example of tools usage. "All togeher: a simple Makefile" is not correct: use a Makefile mentioned above. Programmers Guide http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Javascript/Programmers_guide "Up from the ground" Refers to the first historical Echo Demo Program. Although commented in great detail, no longer usable. This is kept for historical purposes only. The rest of the document is generally usable with the current state of the backend, but it does not cover the HsWTK programming paradigm at all. All examples referring to DOM.Level1 should be treated as if they referred to DOM.Level2, but at this level there are no major differences between DOM levels. "Threads and events" This section was added recently, after successful experiments with CPS and cooperative threads (or rather coroutines), Usable, except for the Message Boxes section: the Control.Concurrent.JSThreads module offers a better imolementation of message boxes. "Inner workings" http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Yhc/Javascript/Inner_workings This was an attempt to describe the internals of the "spineful tagless machine" implemented in Javascript as the central part of the backend runtime. It is about 75% correct as structure of HsFun and HsDly objects varied slightly over time, but the general principles are still there. 3. Conclusion I am hoping that this message answers many questions of people potentially interested in using of this technology. Please feel free to contact me (golubovsky@gmail.com) with any suggestions and constructive critics. I am going to work on improving the project documentation for some time, but if anybody believes that some funcitonality might be now added to the supporting libraries, I am open for discussions. Thanks again. -- Dimitry Golubovsky Anywhere on the Web