reflex-platform VS obelisk

We used reflex-frp, so our app was a webview that worked on localhost and Android. The docs say it also works on iOS but we don't have an iPhone.

The process was learning Functional Reactive Programming, then learning reflex-frp, then getting a contract with obsidian (creators of reflex) for one hour a week where we could ask questions.

( https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform )

We had a grant requirement to create a phone client for Tahoe-LAFS, a Python application with a bunch of dependencies, including ZFEC, a forward error correction library.

( https://tahoe-lafs.readthedocs.io/ )

( https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/zfec/ )

We needed bug for bug compatibility with the Python codebase, so I ran Tahoe on localhost and tested the Haskell client against the Python server. We used servant to build the API, since it builds both client and server side from the same description.

( https://hackage.haskell.org/package/servant )

The type classes do take a toll on performance, but in reflex-platform we change GHC's default flags to make the situation a lot better. It's still not ideal, but our performance winds up being OK for real applications. The most important part is that the performance scales reasonably well as the application grows. It might probably be good at some point to use backpack instead of a typeclass so that specialization can be enforced - though I'd prefer if GHC gave a way to just force specialization more effectively.

Obelisk / reflex-platform contain nix-based solutions to building Haskell code for mobile, so you might be interested in checking out how they do it (or just using them).

In this series of posts, we will describe how a Haskell web application can be developed using reflex-platform. reflex-platform offers reflex and reflex-dom packages. reflex package is the Haskell implementation of Functional reactive programming (FRP). reflex-dom library contains a large number of functions, classes, and types used when dealing with DOM. The packages are separated as it is possible to use the FRP approach not only for web-development. We will develop theTodo List application that allows carrying out various manipulations on the task list.

reflex-platform

To clarify the situation, the canonical way to develop reflex-dom projects is to start from the reflex-platform. See here: https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform/blob/develop/docs/project-development.rst

This might also be coming from the tests of the library (even if they can run in the browser, their tests might not). You can disabled tests using an overrides attribute in project.nix (if using reflex-stone). You can see what it should look like here : https://github.com/reflex-frp/reflex-platform/blob/develop/project/default.nix#L79. You should add this attribute at the same level where "useWarp = true;" is. This should then have lines like "diagrams = pkgs.haskell.lib.dontCheck super.diagrams;" for example if you want to disable the tests for the diagrams package.

then you compile to js using ghcjs like this, then closure compile and gzip it to get the size way down. Then it just becomes a normal script you include wherever you need it.

Hello I remember successfully setting up obelisk a while ago and have gone through the instructions https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk and ensured that everything is installed correctly, when I run the install command fro obelisk it says that it's installed but when I run ob init I get an error of command not found, this is an arch machine not nixOS. Any help would me much appreciated.

If you want to use reflex, the obelisk framework is pretty user friendly. You do have to install nix on your machine, but the ob command handles all the nix interactions for you so you /hopefully/ don't need to know much.

You can make all those things in haskell, and I do professionally. Frontends (entirely in haskell), native IOS and Android applications, Servers, and Games. In fact the framework Obelisk does most of these all out of the box.

Thanks for the comment! We can honestly say that Obelisk is far from perfect, but we're continuously improving the project in our daily basics. And that's why we encourage you to start your adventure with the lib anew. If you still miss a guide to routing with Obelisk, please read this doc. Our team would be happy to answer your further question regarding Obelisk; feel free to email us anytime!

I also had a use case where I needed to extract the nix derivation dependencies of haskell packages: https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk/pull/933

There's also GHCJS, with https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk being (probably) the best choice, but personally I found it extremely tedious to set up a dev environment (not a nix guy) and there's also the learning curve of FRP.

https://github.com/obsidiansystems/obelisk, https://shpadoinkle.org/

I can't speak to the nicest way, as I haven't actually developed any Android apps with Haskell, but I've been meaning to give Obelisk a try.