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Hi, Those among you who have an interest in AJAX-style web
development – that is to say the development of web applications that run
entirely into the browser environment, calling back to the server back-end only
to get raw data -- will probably have noticed the recent appearance of the
Google Web Toolkit (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit). The main idea behind it is very simple: you write your The main advantages of this solution are: - Development using a typed language with good compile-time checks
and debugger support - No plugins (e.g. a Java VM) required on the user machine The disadvantages are: - An additional compilation step - Probably, a significant loss of performance with respect
to hand-written code Assuming that the balance is positive, this naturally raises
the question: why not doing the same with our favourite language? This would require to: -
Retarget one of the existing Haskell
compilers to generate _javascript_ (other possible targets would be Flash or
higher level UI languages such as OpenLaszlo that in turn compiles down to
either Flash or _javascript_/HTML) -
Write a suitable runtime library
(including support for native _javascript_ or Flash UI components, remote method
invocations, multi-threading, etc.) -
Port a usable subset of the Haskell
Libraries -
Select an approach to write user
interfaces in Haskell. There have been many attempts in this direction but I am
unsure if any of them has proven particularly successful. All considered, quite a significant amount of work -- that would
require a concerted group effort -- with a rather uncertain pay-off. Is anyone working on anything similar or that might be
interested in such a project? And has anyone any thoughts to offer on what
compilers/libraries/UI frameworks would be more suitable for the task? Regards, titto assini |
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