GUI - Release of the threepenny-gui library, version 0.5.0.0

I am pleased to announce release of threepenny-gui version 0.5, a cheap and simple library to satisfy your immediate GUI needs in Haskell.

Want to write a small GUI thing but forgot to sacrifice to the giant rubber duck in the sky before trying to install wxHaskell or Gtk2Hs? Then this library is for you! Threepenny is easy to install because it uses the web browser as a display.

The library also has functional reactive programming (FRP) built-in, which makes it a lot easier to write GUI application without getting caught in spaghetti code. For an introduction to FRP, see for example my slides from a tutorial I gave in 2012 (the API is slightly different in Reactive.Threepenny ) and the preliminary widget design guide.

Version 0.5 is essentially a maintenance release, allowing for newer versions of the libraries that it depends on. It also incorporates various contributions by other people, including a small Canvas API by Ken Friis Larsen and Carsten König, and a complete set of SVG elements and attributes by Steve Bigham. Many thanks also to Yuval Langer and JP Moresmau.

However, while it’s great that the library begins to grow in breadth, incorporating larger and larger parts of the DOM API, I also feel that the current backend code is unable to cope with this growth. In the next version, I intend to overhaul the server code and put the JavaScript FFI on a more solid footing.

To see Threepenny in action, have a look at the following applications:

Daniel Austin’s FNIStash

Editor for Torchlight 2 inventories.

Daniel Mlot’s Stunts Cartography Track Viewer

Map viewer for the Stunts racing game.



Get the library here:

Note that the API is still in flux and is likely to change radically in the future. You’ll have to convert frequently or develop against a fixed version.