WxHaskell

What is it?

wxHaskell is a portable and native GUI library for Haskell. The goal of the project is to provide an industrial strength GUI library for Haskell, but without the burden of developing (and maintaining) one ourselves.

wxHaskell is therefore built on top of wxWidgets – a comprehensive C++ library that is portable across all major GUI platforms; including GTK, Windows, X11, and MacOS X. Furthermore, it is a mature library (in development since 1992) that supports a wide range of widgets with the native look-and-feel, and it has a very active community (ranked among the top 25 most active projects on sourceforge).

Status

The core interface of wxHaskell was originally derived from the wxEiffel binding. Work on this has been dormant for several years, but the wxHaskell maintainers now support updates to the wxWidgets API themselves - we generally respond to new releases of wxWidgets within a few weeks at most.

The wrapping is, unfortunately, generated by hand, so there is some (mainly tedious boilerplate) work involved in porting a new set of widgets to wxHaskell. Some work has been done into automating this aspect, but we are far from being able to replicate the approach reliably over then entire API as yet.

From the perspective of the user (rather than the developer) about 90% of the core wxWidgets functionality is already supported, excluding more "exotic" widgets like dockable windows. The library supports Windows, GTK (Linux) and MacOS X.

News

13 October 2009

wxHaskell 0.12.1.2 is released. Since the previous new we have added support for XRC files (XML GUI design) and installation by Cabal

4 January 2009

wxHaskell 0.11.0 is released. See the announcement (indicates rev. 0.11.1, SourceForge has rev. 0.11.0)

8 August 2008

Switched official darcs repository to code.haskell.org (darcs get --partial http://code.haskell.org/wxhaskell). You can use previous darcs.haskell.org's darcs repository, too.

5 August 2008

Homepage (except for screenshots) now moved to Haskell wiki

23 March 2008

wxHaskell 0.10.3 is released.

20 January 2007

wxHaskell has a new set of maintainers, led by Jeremy O'Donoghue. We are working on a release for version 0.10, with Unicode support, a Cabalized build process and more. All recent development is taking place under a new darcs repository (darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/wxhaskell/).

Documentation

• Screenshots
  • Samples
  • Applications
• Using wxHaskell
  • License
  • Quick start
  • FAQ
  • Short guide
  • Tips and tricks
• Download
• Building and installing
  • Linux
  • MacOS X
• Development
• Contribute

Resources

• Bugtracker
• The developer mailing list (wxhaskell-devel) (archive)
• The wxHaskell users mailing list (wxhaskell-users) (archive)

External links

• Daan Leijen: wxHaskell / A Portable and Concise GUI Library for Haskell (pdf)
• Wei Tan: GUI programming with wxHaskell (pdf)
• Assignment 1 part of the course Advanced Functional Programming, by Koen Lindström Claessen and Björn Bringert, a portal like page (html)
• Blog articles about wxHaskell
• Sander Evers, Peter Achten, and Jan Kuper: A Functional Programming Technique for Forms in GUI (PDF)
• FunctionalForms, a combinator library/domain specific language for wxHaskell which enables a very concise programming style for forms] (not maintained since 2005)

See also

• The Haskell wikibook GUI chapter
• WxGeneric
• wxFruit
• Can GUI Programming Be Liberated From The IO Monad
• Phooey: a purely functional layer on top of WxHaskell
• GuiTV: GUI-based tangible values & composable interfaces, on TV, Phooey and WxHaskell.
• wxAsteroids: a game demonstrating wxHaskell.
• GeBoP: the General Boardgames Player, offers a set of board games: Ataxx, Bamp, Halma, Hez, Kram, Nim, Reversi, TicTacToe, and Zenix.