Front End Framework

[parsonsmatt]

There are two main points to this project: 1) Build an application with functional programming techniques, 2) Make something useful to fill a perceived void in the market. Since learning is a big part of what I want to accomplish here, I'm going to document what I want to do for a "minimal implementation" for each framework/methodology I want to attempt (unless I decide one is simply superior).

• Authentication
• Registration
• Logging a session (with no helpers/tooltips/analysis/parsing/etc)
• Local storage

I'm intending on attempting a build for the following:

• PureScript Halogen
• Elm
• GHCjs (Reflex-dom? React-flux? Something else?)
• Maybe ClojureScript and Om?

If none of the above end up being nice enough, I'll just do it with a JavaScript front end and call it a learning experience. This thread will document my general experiences with the various approaches as well.

On a general level, the big pros/cons that I can see for JavaScript are:

Pros:

• React, Immutable, Redux, etc. make development fairly tolerable.
• The JavaScript tooling is pretty enviable -- webpack hot loader is neat!
• Tons of work is already done and the ecosystem has libraries for everything.
• And, this is the biggest one: boilerplate around sending/receiving JSON is essentially 0. On the server, Aeson and Servant reduce the boilerplate around de/serialization.

Cons:

It's JavaScript.

[parsonsmatt]

PureScript Halogen

(this comment will be edited to reflect my current opinion as I feel like doing so)

I'm finding that I'm writing a ton of boiler plate around lenses, AJAX, serializing and deserializing my types, etc. Halogen is a fantastic framework for building out the UI, but there doesn't seem to be a good solution in PureScript-land for doing AJAX conveniently.

[parsonsmatt]

Elm

Elm was a very nice and friendly experience when I was briefly demonstrating it, but the lack of type classes (or similar means of abstraction) and the verbose de/serialization code negated many of the benefits. There seems to be good work around generating Elm client from Servant, and the Haskell-Elm bridge. These would make Elm much nicer to use, and potentially give it the leg up over PureScript despite having a less powerful core language.

[kozak]

I would be very interested in your current opinion :)

[parsonsmatt]

I'm pretty sold on PureScript these days. Since I wrote that evaluation, they've done a lot of work on reducing boilerplate, and it's pretty easy to do PS codegen from Haskell types.