[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: Phooey -- a Functional UI library for Haskell

Antony Courtney antony.courtney at gmail.com
Tue Dec 12 08:16:37 EST 2006


Hi Conal,

Looks like an interesting system.

A few questions:
   - What is the underlying Arrow here, and how does it differ from Yampa?
(And the obvious follow-on: If they are similar, why not just use Yampa?)
   - How will your layout model deal with layouts that aren't rectilinear?
   - Do you support events or switching (in the FRP sense)?
   - How do you plan to deal with dynamic collections (opening/closing
new windows at runtime, or adding/removing widgets from a running
GUI)?  IMO, this is the biggest challenge to presenting a purely
functional API but using a standard GUI toolkit for the underlying widget
set.

Regards,

    -Antony

On 12/12/06, Conal Elliott <conal at conal.net> wrote:
>
> Announcing Phooey <http://conal.net/phooey>, 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 ("*Ph*unctional *oo*s*e*r *y*nterfaces") 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 of Phooey's style, 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.
>
>
> 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 <http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/phooey/doc> (which
> includes more examples), and try the code via
>
> darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/phooey --partial
>
>
> Directions for building are in the README<http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/phooey/README>file. Distribution tarballs are
> here <http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/phooey/dist>.
>
> Comments and collaboration are very welcome!
>
> Cheers,
>
>        - Conal
>
> P.S. I'm very grateful for Don Stewart's recent pointers on how to create
> & release Haskell projects.
>
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>
>
>
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