Building GUIs In Haskell
Stc
Date: 2006-12-14
Time: 11:45
Room: BBL room 471
Speaker: Thomas van Noort
Title: Building GUIs in Haskell (slides/paper)
Abstract
For a long time, building Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) in Haskell
has been underrated. A common prejudice is that a functional language
like Haskell, in contrast to an object-oriented language, is not
suitable for building a GUI. Most GUI libraries are implemented in an
object-oriented language, which provides an intuitive feel to building a
GUI. Moreover, most people write their first GUI in an object-oriented
language, which prevents them from using Haskell for building GUIs at a
later time.
This talk discusses what features of Haskell make the language very
suitable for building GUIs. Two monadic libraries, Gtk2Hs and wxHaskell,
are presented to illustrate that it is not hard to build a GUI in
Haskell. A running example is used to compare the two libraries, and
their usability in particular. Furthermore, an extension for both
libraries is discussed to further improve the usability: the visual GUI
builder Glade for Gtk2Hs, and the eXtended and Typed Control (XTC)
library for wxHaskell.
