Bridging the GUI gap with reactive values and relations

There are at present two ways to write GUIs for functional code. One is to use standard GUI toolkits, with all the benefits they bring in terms of feature completeness, choice of platform, conformance to platform-specific look-and-feel, long-term viability, etc. However, such GUI APIs mandate an imperative programming style for the GUI and related parts of the application. Alternatively, we can use a functional GUI toolkit. The GUI can then be written in a functional style, but at the cost of foregoing many advantages of standard toolkits that often will be of critical importance. This paper introduces a light-weight framework structured around the notions of reactive values and reactive relations . It allows standard toolkits to be used from functional code written in a functional style. We thus bridge the gap between the two worlds, bringing the advantages of both to the developer. Our framework is available on Hackage and has been been validated through the development of non-trivial applications in a commercial context, and with different standard GUI toolkits

Bridging the GUI gap with reactive values and relations

There are at present two ways to write GUIs for functional code. One is to use standard GUI toolkits, with all the benefits they bring in terms of feature completeness, choice of platform, conformance to platform-specific look-and-feel, long-term viability, etc. However, such GUI APIs mandate an imperative programming style for the GUI and related parts of the application. Alternatively, we can use a functional GUI toolkit. The GUI can then be written in a functional style, but at the cost of foregoing many advantages of standard toolkits that often will be of critical importance. This paper introduces a light-weight framework structured around the notions of reactive values and reactive relations . It allows standard toolkits to be used from functional code written in a functional style. We thus bridge the gap between the two worlds, bringing the advantages of both to the developer. Our framework is available on Hackage and has been been validated through the development of non-trivial applications in a commercial context, and with different standard GUI toolkits

Structured reactive programming with polymorphic temporal tiles

International audienceIn functional reactive programming (FRP), system inputs and outputs are generally modeled as functions over continuous time (behaviors) whose future values are governed by sudden changes (events). In this approach, discrete events are embedded into piece-wise continuous behaviors. In the field of reactive music system programming, we develop an orthogonal approach that seems to better fit our need. Much like piano keys can be played and combined both in sequence and in parallel, we model system inputs and outputs as spatio-temporal combinations of what we call temporal values: continuous functions over time whose domain lays between two events: a start and a stop event. Various high level data types and program constructs can then be derived from such a model. They are shown to satisfy robust algebraic and category theoretic properties. Altogether, this eventually provides a simple, robust and elegant programming front-end, temporal tile programming, for reading, memorizing, stretching, combining and transforming flows of inputs into flows of outputs. Although at its infancy, the resulting approach has been experimentally validated for reactive and real-time music system programming