elm-spa-example VS Elm

About 7 years ago, in the midst of writing Elm in Action, Richard Feldman developed rtfeldman/elm-spa-example, wrote Tour of an Open-Source Elm SPA and graciously shared both of them with the Elm community. The community's response was overwhelmingly positive and it was clear that he had addressed a major need. If you were one of the many web application developers asking "Where can I find an open-source example of an Elm Single Page Application?", then, the Elm SPA Example instantly became the canonical example that everyone was going to point you towards. This was a landmark achievement in the history of Elm.

One accidentally nice thing about that book is the elm version is still the same, so everything is still relevant. As for the SPA, I think the book had to keep things simple, but you'd probably want to look into the author's elm-spa-example next, there's a talk on youtube that goes along with that and he also also a related course on frontend maters worth exploring.

I'm following along with the update behavior of https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-spa-example/blob/master/src/Main.elm. But I'm not sure how I propagate a message from Main.elm to User.elm to Table.elm (or deeper). How do you manage Msg passing like this?

I am building my first Elm app just following the docs from the official web site. I don't see any direct mention of styling there. Looking around, I see the elm-ui project is one, elm-css is another approach, and the example SPA that Richard Feldman made just uses a stylesheet from Bootstrap, i.e., just plain CSS. If it exists, what's the canonical way of styling an app?

A good example of this is the Elm-SPA example from Feldman: the Main.elm file is basically just glue code for the rest of the project (https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-spa-example/blob/master/src/Main.elm).

After all that I've managed to reach my goal of being able to run Richard Feldman's Elm SPA Example in my system! 😃 Here's a working implementation compiled to WebAssembly. And for comparison, you can also check out the same code compiled to JavaScript. (Unfortunately the publicly available APIs don't seem to be returning very much data at the moment but there's not much I can do about that!)

Looking at the Real World application I could see that there were better ways to structure my modules using nested TEAs and keeping the Main module as a hub for everything in the app.

If you want to see Elm code, you might look for example projects on GitHub. (https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-spa-example comes to mind.)

https://github.com/rtfeldman/elm-spa-example is a good example app. I'd also recommend https://codebase.show/projects/realworld in general if you're looking for example apps in various frameworks and languages. I sadly can't share anything from work as it's all private.

- How to properly structure the project. I differentiate between my core utils and the actual gui. Iced states in the documentation that it's inspired by the Elm architecture. So naturally I've read a little bit about the proposed Elm project structure. So I basically end in a structure like this spa example directory recommended by the Elm communicty: Repo

Elm [1] is based on a similar idea. Build your app from pure functions that return HTML tags.

[1] https://elm-lang.org/

You also wouldn't really be creating your own new programing language. You would be creating something that can run JavaScript by following JavaScript standards and syntax. You might be able to add some non-standard features of your own on top of those standards, or include your own standard library of helpers or utilities, but you can't completely make a new or alternative language and then load it in the browser (or at least not by reimplementing ECMAScript standards... you actually can make your own language that runs within any Javascript enviroment, if you provide an interpreter or compiler that transforms it into valid JS. Some people have done something like this, eg Elm: https://elm-lang.org/).

You should at least have a look at https://elm-lang.org/ it is a pure functional language like Haskell (although with fewer fancy syntax/type classes) but it has some lovely libraries for visualisation and even with plain elm (+ elm-ui) doing string transformations can be easily done.

I get it. However, the whole point of using Unions to narrow your types, ensure only a set of possible scenarios can occur, and only access data of a particular union when it’s safe to do so. That’s some of what pattern matching can provide, and 100% of what using switch statements in TypeScript with their Discriminated Unions can provide. Yes, it’s not 100% exhaustive, but TypeScript is not soundly typed, and even Elm which is still has the same issue TypeScript does: You’re running in JavaScript where anything is possible. So it’s good enough to build with and much better than what you had.

The beauty of a language like Elm (and other lambda-calculus / functional programming inspired languages) is that there's very little transformation involved in going from an idea to code. And that seems to have a big impact on getting things done.

I think the most fun and approachable way for beginners to build games with functional programming is with Elm [1].

See a few (small, demo) games built by the community in [2] .

Notice Elm has abandoned the FRP approach in favor of Model-View-Update [3].

[1] https://elm-lang.org/