wxhaskell-users

[wxhaskell-users] wxhaskell vs. HToolkit

[Per L. <pe...@L4...>]

Hi,

I have lately experimented with both wxhaskell and HToolkit. I'm a bit=20
confused, they seems very similiar in style and have common implementors=20
(Daan Leijen).  I have also read that the haskell community has decided t=
hat=20
the "common GUI" project, which I suppose HToolkit is an implementation o=
f,=20
is no longer officially supported as a project for obtaining a standard G=
UI=20
library for haskell, but that wxhaskell instead is the preferred library.

Could someone in the knowing say a few words about what this will mean fo=
r=20
these libraries. Are these completely distinct libraries or is the meanin=
g=20
that they will contain more or less the same functionality and similar=20
interface, if not what are the advantages for choosing one or another? Wh=
at=20
will be the practical implications of that wxhaskell is officially suppor=
ted=20
by the haskell community and that HToolkit is not?=20

Regards
Per

RE: [wxhaskell-users] wxhaskell vs. HToolkit

[Daan L. <daa...@xs...>]

Hi Per,

> I have lately experimented with both wxhaskell and HToolkit. 
> I'm a bit  confused, they seems very similiar in style and have common

> implementors (Daan Leijen).  

History:

At the beginning of 2003, I was disappointed with the current state
of affairs regarding GUI's for Haskell. A most promising project
was the HToolkit library by Krasimir Angelov. He started this project
to make a portable successor of the objectIO library.

He created a low-level C interface for programming GUI's. He 
implemented this interface for both Windows and GTK -- getting
a somewhat portable way to program GUI's. HToolkit was a bit
monolithic at that time and I separated out the low-level interface
(Port) and designed a higher level interface (GIO).

Although I was very enthousiastic to begin with, I slowly became
aware of the drawbacks of this approach. In my opinion, it will
be too hard to maintain such a library for multiple platforms -- 
slowly the task will grow bigger and bigger, and bugs just kept
creeping up. Furthermore, I realized that it is probably also
too much work to support the amount of features necessary 
for "real" applications. I got more and more confirmed in my
doubts when I studied other portable GUI libraries -- almost all
have died a slow and lingering death due to unsupported features,
platforms, and bugs -- even rather nicely designed and technologically
advanced libraries.  

So, in the end I concluded that designing, implementing, and
*maintaining*
such library will be too hard for a small community like that of
Haskell,
and I abandoned the project (although I still believe it is a nice
and cleanly designed library)

The right way of doing a portable library for Haskell, is to build on 
the work of others! So I used the wxWindows library as the basis to
build a portable GUI library for Haskell. wxWindows is free, portable
across many platforms (windows,macOSX,GTK,X11,...) and has a large
and active user community (top 25 of sourceforge, over 1 million
downloads). 
Furthermore, rather serious applications have been written in it, 
including the latest AOL communicator and Mojoworld. 

The good part is now that we don't have to do anything (well, almost:-)
to run on different platforms -- that is all done by the wxWindows
community.
Furthermore, the interface is generated automatically, so it is easy
to follow new versions and to maintain the library. And we are not the
only ones to see these advantages, wxPython is higly popular and many
other bindings are there: wxEiffel, wx.NET, wxJScript, wxLUA, etc.

wxWindows is also fairly comprehensive -- this makes it easy to support
new features: just over the weekend there is support for portable ODBC 
and the OpenGL canvas (will be included in the next release).
It saves a *lot* of work when all the hard parts have already been done
by others :-)

There are also drawbacks: wxWindows is not as "clean" as I would have 
liked it to be, it written in C++, the library is rather large etc. But
I don't think these drawbacks are serious enough in the light of the
advantages.


> I have also read that the haskell community  has decided that 
> the "common GUI" project, which I suppose HToolkit is an 
> implementation of, is no longer officially supported as a project for
obtaining 
> a standard GUI library for haskell, but that wxhaskell instead is the 
> preferred library.

Opinion:

This is a "sensitive" subject :-).  I would say that the
"common GUI" interface is not abandoned. It still makes sense to define
a kind of standard medium level interface that is somewhat 
standardized. However, I believe that it is too hard at this moment
to define such a thing -- besides technical challenges with regard to 
types, it is also unclear how the interfaces should look like. There is
no
well defined goal and I think that is because there are just not many
real GUI programs written in Haskell (except maybe for Programmatica?)

> What will be the practical implications of that wxhaskell is 
> officially supported by the haskell community and that HToolkit is
not? 

Current:

It is a rather unfortunate situation that in this small community
there are now two libraries that try to do the same thing :-( 
I don't know what to do about this, and maybe we should just leave
it as it is (although I would love to have Krasimir as a co-developer,
he is an excellent programmer :-).

I hope this answers some of your questions,
and that it puts things into perspective,

All the best,
 Daan Leijen.

 
> Regards
> Per
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program.
> Does SourceForge.net help you be more productive?  Does it
> help you create better code?   SHARE THE LOVE, and help us help
> YOU!  Click Here: http://sourceforge.net/donate/
> _______________________________________________
> wxhaskell-users mailing list
> wxh...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wxhaskell-users
> 
> 
> 

Re: [wxhaskell-users] wxhaskell vs. HToolkit

[Gour <go...@ma...>]

Daan Leijen (daa...@xs...) wrote:

Hi Daan!

It's my 1st post to the list and I want to thank you for wxhaskell.

After seeing David's darcs I've become interested in Haskell - even to the
extent to learn it :-)

Since I was/am interested in Ruby & wxRuby project, it is great to be able to
use Haskell with wxWindows library :-))

> It is a rather unfortunate situation that in this small community
> there are now two libraries that try to do the same thing :-( 

What could be the size of Haskell community in comparison with Ruby?

> I don't know what to do about this, and maybe we should just leave
> it as it is (although I would love to have Krasimir as a co-developer,
> he is an excellent programmer :-).

I'm glad that you are taking pragmatic approach - better to have something
stable (like wxhaskell), than to wait for the "pure FP" solution.

As far as I can see, Haskell is great language and it needs more real-world
applications to draw the attention of new users/programmers.

David's darcs is the prime example of this and I'm sure that it will bring
many souls into Haskell community.

At the end I just want to inform you that I put together some ebuild for
Gentoo,but since the current version has some bugs it cannot build properly, so
I am waiting for some fix and then I can send wxhaskell.ebuild for Gentoo to
the list for inspection before creating account on Gentoo's bugzilla so it can
be included into Portage tree.

Please, bear in mind, however, that I'm total newbie in Haskell, as well in
wxhaskell :-)

However, I'm ready to learn, but before that I have to finish some
seminar/workshop and then I'm going to start with Crafting FP.

Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
Gour
go...@ma...
Registered Linux User #278493

RE: [wxhaskell-users] wxhaskell vs. HToolkit

[Daan L. <daa...@xs...>]

Hi Gour,

> After seeing David's darcs I've become interested in Haskell 
> - even to the extent to learn it :-)

I know about darcs, but I wasn't aware that it uses wxHaskell.
If I can find some spare time, I'll try to take a look at it.
(however, I defend my PhD thesis next tuesday, so don't hold your breath
:-)

> What could be the size of Haskell community in comparison with Ruby?

I have no idea, since I can't judge how active Ruby is. However, it
seems
that the Haskell is gaining momentum lately -- so maybe it is not as
small anymore as it used to be. More and more, Haskell is finding its
way into "real" programming (vs. research.)

> At the end I just want to inform you that I put together some 
> ebuild for Gentoo,but since the current version has some bugs it
cannot 
> build properly, so I am waiting for some fix and then I can send 
> wxhaskell.ebuild for Gentoo to the list for inspection before creating
account on Gentoo's 
> bugzilla so it can be included into Portage tree.

I don't know what an "ebuild" is, but I assume it is something like
a "rpm" but than for sources? If so, I would be very interested to 
automate this process and work with you to include your scripts into
the distribution. Let me know when you have some working system.

All the best,
 Daan.

> 
> Please, bear in mind, however, that I'm total newbie in 
> Haskell, as well in
> wxhaskell :-)
> 
> However, I'm ready to learn, but before that I have to finish some
> seminar/workshop and then I'm going to start with Crafting FP.
> 
> Sincerely,
> Gour
> 
> -- 
> Gour
> go...@ma...
> Registered Linux User #278493
> 
> 
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------
> This SF.net email is sponsored by: SF.net Giveback Program.
> Does SourceForge.net help you be more productive?  Does it
> help you create better code?   SHARE THE LOVE, and help us help
> YOU!  Click Here: http://sourceforge.net/donate/
> _______________________________________________
> wxhaskell-users mailing list
> wxh...@li...
> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/wxhaskell-users
> 
> 

Re: [wxhaskell-users] wxhaskell vs. HToolkit

[Gour <go...@ma...>]

Daan Leijen (daa...@xs...) wrote:

> I know about darcs, but I wasn't aware that it uses wxHaskell.

Well, at the it is Haskell only, but wxhaskell was mentioned on darcs'
mailing list when there was discussion about GUI, hence .. :-)

> If I can find some spare time, I'll try to take a look at it.  (however, I
> defend my PhD thesis next tuesday, so don't hold your breath :-)

Take care for your health, doctor :-)

> I have no idea, since I can't judge how active Ruby is. However, it seems
> that the Haskell is gaining momentum lately -- so maybe it is not as small
> anymore as it used to be. More and more, Haskell is finding its way into
> "real" programming (vs. research.)

That's good since according to K.F.Gauss "Theory attracts practice s the magnet
attracts iron." (quoted in The Ruby Way by H. Fulton), so it means the theory
is good enough.


> I don't know what an "ebuild" is, but I assume it is something like
> a "rpm" but than for sources? If so, I would be very interested to 
> automate this process and work with you to include your scripts into
> the distribution. Let me know when you have some working system.

Ebuild is a kind of bash script responsible to install certtain package from
the source (Gentoo is source-based distro) and the usual practice is to
open account on bugs.gentoo.org and submit ebuild there. This way the package 
is entering into test or unstable tree, and with the time it can enter stable
Portage tree and become included in official distribution. (Of course, it needs
someone as maintainer.)

I'll let you know when it's ready.

Sincerely,
Gour

ps. What are the official requiremtns for wxhaskell build (wxWindows, ghc, 
supported versions)? (I built mine with wx2.4.1 & ghc6.0.1.

-- 
Gour
go...@ma...
Registered Linux User #278493

Re: [wxhaskell-users] wxhaskell vs. HToolkit

[Gour <go...@ma...>]

Gour (go...@ma...) wrote:

Somehow it looks like vim eat some characters :-(
> 
> Well, at the it is Haskell only, but wxhaskell was mentioned on darcs'
             ^^^ moment 
> mailing list when there was discussion about GUI, hence .. :-)

Sincerely,
Gour

-- 
Gour
go...@ma...
Registered Linux User #278493

Re: [wxhaskell-users] wxhaskell vs. HToolkit

[David R. <dr...@jd...>]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 08:40:33AM +0100, Gour wrote:
> Daan Leijen (daa...@xs...) wrote:
> > I know about darcs, but I wasn't aware that it uses wxHaskell.
> 
> Well, at the moment it is Haskell only, but wxhaskell was mentioned on
> darcs' mailing list when there was discussion about GUI, hence .. :-)

There is already optional GUI support in the latest darcs (using
wxhaskell).  It's not really useful yet (although it can be used), since I
haven't created a decent patch-viewing widget.  That's waiting on your
resizing fixes, so after wxhaskell 0.4 I'll take a look at it again and see
how far I get.

Darcs' gui interface is actually a bit unusual, in that it only exists for
certain commands, and so the command line is still required.  It's a
replacement for interactive prompting rather than a replacement for the
command line.  Which is pleasant to implement with wxhaskell's 'start'
function, which lets me start an interface whenever I want to (although
once I start it, it can't stop until I am willing to exit, which is
unfortunate--I'm going to have to figure out how to close a window without
exiting the program, since sometimes I have to prompt the user, and
afterwards run for a few minutes with no user interaction.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org