Phooey

Phooey is a functional UI library for Haskell.

GUIs are usually programmed in an "unnatural" style, in that implementation dependencies are inverted, relative to logical dependencies. This reversal results directly from the imperative orientation of most GUI libraries. While outputs depend on inputs from a user and semantic point of view, the imperative approach imposes an implementation dependence of inputs on outputs.

Phooey ("Phunctional ooser ynterfaces") retains the functional style, in which outputs are expressed in terms of inputs. In addition, Phooey supports dynamic input bounds, flexible layout, and mutually-referential widgets.

As an example, below is a simple shopping list GUI. The total displayed at the bottom of the window always shows the sum of the values of the apples and bananas input sliders. When a user changes the inputs, the output updates accordingly.

[1]

Phooey is structured as an arrow, and this example uses arrow notation. The code:

    ui1 :: UI () ()
    ui1 = title "Shopping List" $
          proc () -> do
            a <- title "apples"  (islider 3) -< (0,10)
            b <- title "bananas" (islider 7) -< (0,10)
            title "total" showDisplay        -< a+b

I am working on a paper about Phooey. For now, please see the Haddock documentation (which includes more examples), and try the code via

darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/phooey

Directions for building are in the README file. Distribution tarballs are here.

On portability: Phooey is built on wxHaskell. Quoting from the wxHaskell home page

wxHaskell is therefore built on top of wxWidgets -- a comprehensive C++ library that is portable across all major GUI platforms; including GTK, Windows, X11, and MacOS X.

So I expect that Phooey runs on all of these platforms. That said, I have only tried Phooey on Windows. Please give it a try and let me know what happens.

Comments and collaboration are very welcome!