idris2-dom-mvc: Single Page Web Applications in Idris

This is an experimental library about putting a nice API on top of idris2-dom for writing interactive single page web applications. Unlike the idris2-rhone-js library, which takes a functional reactive programming approach to GUI programming, the concept of this library is much simpler: Events fired from user interaction update the current application state via pure functions, and the UI is updated according to the current event and new application state. This is a similar approach to what the Elm programming language does. However, we take a more fine-grained approach to updating the DOM and therefore don't need an extra step via a virtual DOM, which can be beneficial for performance.

This is still very much work in progress, but I transferred the whole rhone-js tutorial to this library and the resulting code is a lot simpler compared to the one from rhone-js. Here's the link to the tutorial.

Dependencies

This project makes use of several other Idris2 projects:

• idris2-elab-util
• idris2-dom
• idris2-refined
• idris2-tailrec
• idris2-json-simple

It is strongly suggested to use a package manager like pack to install and maintain the required dependencies and build the project.

Building the Example Page

If you have installed pack as suggested above, you can build the example page with make page and have a look at it by loading mvc.html into your browser.

Package dom-mvc-extra

This additional library contains an opinionated set of utilities I find generally useful in my own projects. It takes a slightly different approach towards the "model, view, update" concept, by introducing stateful computations (from Control.Monad.State) paired with optics (from idris2-monocle) for operating on smaller parts of a large application state.

In addition, it introduces several new data types and interactive DOM elements that I typically like to have around.