If you're interested in a functional approach to UI code, check out functional reactive programming (FRP). It's a declarative way to specify UI logic which abstracts away much of the inherent messiness of using mutable state and callbacks.
I've played around with FRP in Haskell, and have found it much nicer than the more standard approaches to implementing UI logic. Before using FRP, my main UI experience was with Java Swing and web development, and FRP is definitely a step up. I've found it easier to write the code in the first place and then much easier to add new features and logic.
I've only used FRP with native UIs, but I think it would be very natural for web development as well. It's certainly a shift in philosophy and mindset, but one that I think is well worth overcoming.
Unfortunately, I do not know of a good tutorial for using FRP. I'm sure there are some out there, but I basically picked it up by reading academic papers which are not to everyone's taste. That said, I actually found some of the papers were clearer than the blog posts and SO questions I found online!
I'm probably going to write a basic FRP tutorial in Haskell some time soon, probably built around some very simple application (maybe John Conway's Game of Life). It really is a fun subject. Is anybody interested in something like that?
I recently finally understood FRP and I'm working on my own library on top of Flapjax and Enfocus (ClojureScript) to make things simpler than doing everything by hand.
However, I can't find examples of systems of moderate (or big) size - nothing to get inspiration from, all examples I've seen are quite small and do too much by hand. They often select elements (like button to track click on) from whole document by id (and in big app this is pretty useless except for some top-level elements), or interwind templates with bindings to events and interaction between them is structured so that it feels like almost using globals. Directly changing top-level data from some inner template.
Anyway, I've got some ideas - display is easy though, what's hard is nicely structuring forms and buttons IMO - but it takes time to carve them out in code. I would love to read something on topic of structuring applications, which are more than a single input and a single list.
Definitely interested. I've been looking at FRP for a school project. I haven't done a lot of investigation yet, mainly just branching off http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_Reactive_Progr..., saving bookmarks and reading papers like you mentioned.
Comments
If you're interested in a functional approach to UI code, check out functional reactive programming (FRP). It's a declarative way to specify UI logic which abstracts away much of the inherent messiness of using mutable state and callbacks.
I've played around with FRP in Haskell, and have found it much nicer than the more standard approaches to implementing UI logic. Before using FRP, my main UI experience was with Java Swing and web development, and FRP is definitely a step up. I've found it easier to write the code in the first place and then much easier to add new features and logic.
I've only used FRP with native UIs, but I think it would be very natural for web development as well. It's certainly a shift in philosophy and mindset, but one that I think is well worth overcoming.
Unfortunately, I do not know of a good tutorial for using FRP. I'm sure there are some out there, but I basically picked it up by reading academic papers which are not to everyone's taste. That said, I actually found some of the papers were clearer than the blog posts and SO questions I found online!
I'm probably going to write a basic FRP tutorial in Haskell some time soon, probably built around some very simple application (maybe John Conway's Game of Life). It really is a fun subject. Is anybody interested in something like that?
I recently finally understood FRP and I'm working on my own library on top of Flapjax and Enfocus (ClojureScript) to make things simpler than doing everything by hand.
However, I can't find examples of systems of moderate (or big) size - nothing to get inspiration from, all examples I've seen are quite small and do too much by hand. They often select elements (like button to track click on) from whole document by id (and in big app this is pretty useless except for some top-level elements), or interwind templates with bindings to events and interaction between them is structured so that it feels like almost using globals. Directly changing top-level data from some inner template.
Anyway, I've got some ideas - display is easy though, what's hard is nicely structuring forms and buttons IMO - but it takes time to carve them out in code. I would love to read something on topic of structuring applications, which are more than a single input and a single list.
Definitely interested. I've been looking at FRP for a school project. I haven't done a lot of investigation yet, mainly just branching off http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Functional_Reactive_Progr..., saving bookmarks and reading papers like you mentioned.
I also believe that web development doesn't really benefit from functional programming. That said there are two good FRP projects out there:
Elm: http://elm-lang.org/ and to some extent Meteor: http://docs.meteor.com/#reactivity