Glazier.React contains efficient haskell bindings to React JS where render will only be called for the react components with changed states.

It uses the haskell glazier library to enable composable windows

Features

Efficient rendering

Using React.PureComponent and react render will only be called for component who’s state actually changed, instead of requiring react to diff the entire DOM.

Composable widgets

Glazier allows disciplined and lawful ways of creating composable widgets. Larger can be created out of other widgets without modifying existing widget code, or manual “lifting state” into larger widgets.

For example, List Widget creates a list of any other widget.

Isolation of IO

The stateful effects are pure and do not involve IO. This has the benefit of allowing better testing of the intention of gadgets; increasing confidence of the behaviour of the gadget, reducing the surface area of IO misbehaviour.

There are only two places where IO is allowed:

1. in the gadget Command interpreter,
2. in the event callback handlers, due to the need to read properties from javascript and dispatching Actions. Besides dispatching Actions, it is bad practice to create any other observable side effects in event handlers.

Combine multiple concurrent stateful effects

AFAIK, Haskell is the only language where you can combine multiple concurrent stateful effects consistently.

Compile using GHC as well as GHCJS

Glazier.React uses ghcjs-base-stub allows compiling GHCJS projects using GHC, which means you can develop using intero.

Easier management of GHCJS callbacks

Glazier.React uses disposable to ease cleanup of GHCJS callbacks. It also uses a Free Monad Maker DSL to ease creation of callbacks for widgets.

blaze/lucid style do notation

React elements can be coded using blaze/lucid-style do notation using ReactMlT

Haskell-driven rendering

All state and processing is in Haskell, meaning only a simple shim React.Component is required. This reduces the amount of javascript required and reduces the need for complex stateful integration with React.

Examples

TodoMVC

This is a fully featured TodoMVC in in Haskell and ReactJS using the glazier-react library.

For a live demo, see https://louispan.github.io/glazier-react-examples/

For more details, see the todo example README.md

Documentation

React

• Please refer to react docs. You only need to read up to handling events.
• Also read Lists and Keys, and Refs and the DOM.
• Ignore controlled input in Forms. In my experience, controlled input is error-prone and it is better to use it uncontrolled.
  • Using uncontrolled input doesn’t stop you from subscribing to onChange and obtaining the latest value of the input. Just do not force a render with reactsetState.

Glazier

Please read the README.md for a brief overview of glazier.

Markup

Glazier.React.Markup is a StateT monad that enables blaze/lucid style do notation to markup React elements to render.

bh (strJS "footer") [("className", strJS "footer")] $ do
    bh (strJS "span") [ ("className", strJS "todo-count")
                      , ("key", strJS "todo-count")] $ do
            bh (strJS "strong") [("key", strJS "pieces")]
                (s ^. activeCount . to (txt . pack . show))
            txt " pieces left"

Event handling

React re-uses Notice from a pool, which means it may no longer be valid if we lazily parse it. However, we still want lazy parsing so we don’t parse unnecessary fields.

Additionally, we don’t want to block during the event handling.The reason this is a problem is because Javascript is single threaded, but Haskell is lazy. Therefore GHCJS threads are a strange mixture of synchronous and asynchronous threads, where a synchronous thread might be converted to an asynchronous thread if a “black hole” is encountered. See https://github.com/ghcjs/ghcjs-base/blob/master/GHCJS/Concurrent.hs

Glazier.React.Event uses the event handling idea from the haskell react-flux library to allow lazy parsing of event safely.

Event handling should only be done via eventHandler or eventHandlerM.

eventHandlerM :: (Monad m, NFData a) => (evt -> m a) -> (a -> m b) -> (evt -> m b)

This safe interface requires two input functions:

1. a function to reduce Notice to a NFData. The mkEventCallback will ensure that the NFData is forced which will ensure all the required fields from Synthetic event has been parsed. This function must not block.
2. a second function that uses the NFData. This function is allowed to block.

mkEventHandler results in a function that you can safely pass into ‘GHC.Foreign.Callback.syncCallback1’ with ‘GHCJS.Foreign.Callback.ContinueAsync’.

Simple and efficient React.Component integration

Glazier.React only uses ReactJS as a thin layer for rendering and registering event handlers. All state and event processing are performed in Haskell, which means only a simple shim React.PureComponent is required.

Only one shim React component is ever used and the only methods are required are setState, render and componentDidUpdate,

The shim component only has one thing in it’s state, a sequence number. This sequence number is only changed with setState when the Glazier.Gadget determined that there is a need for re-rendering. This is easy and efficient to determine since Gadget is the StateT responsible for changing the state in the first place.

This has the benefits of:

• Only the react shim components with changed haskell state will be re-rendered.
• React is able to efficiently determine if state has changed (just a single integer comparison)
• The shim React component is very simple.

Modelling

Glazier.React.Model contain many nuanced concepts of Model.

Schema

The Schema is a template of the pure data for stateful logic (the nouns). It is parameterized by a type variable which specializes it to either an Outline or ‘Model’.

Outline

The Outline is the pure data for stateful logic (the nouns). It may contain ‘Outline’s of child widgets. The Outline does not contain enough information for rendering the child widgets.

Model

The Model is similar to Outline, except that it may also contain Gizmos of child widgets. It may contain Gizmo (see below) of other widgets. The Model contains enough information to render child widgets, but not this widget.

Plan

The Plan contains the callbacks for integrating with React (the verbs). It also contains a javascript reference to the instance of shim component used for the widget. This reference is used to trigger rendering with setState.

Scene

Scene is basically a tuple of Model and Plan. It is a separate data type in order to generate convenient lenses to the fields. Scene is all that a Window needs to purely generate rendering instructions.

Frame

Frame is a type synonym of MVar Scene. It is a mutable holder of a copy of Scene. This is so how the official state from Haskell is communicated to the React render callback. The render callback will read the latest copy of Scene from the MVar and pass it to the widget Window for rendering.

Gizmo

Gizmo is basically a tuple of Scene and Frame. It is a separate data type in order to generate convenient lenses to the fields. This contains everything a widget needs for rendering and state processing. Most state processing is performed using the pure Model. The Frame is only used for the RenderCommand, to put the latest Scene into the Frame when re-rendering is required.

Maker

MVars for Frames and Callbacks for Plans may only be created in IO. Using Free Monads, Glazier.React.Maker provides a safe way to create them without allowing other arbitrary IO.

The Maker can also be used create the initial Gizmo state for the widgets. The Maker DSL has an action type parameter which indicated the type of action that is dispatched by the widget. The action type can be mapped and hoisted to a larger action type, allow for embedding the smaller widget action in larger widget actions.

Disposable

GHCJS Callbacks has resources that are not automatically collected by the garbage collector. Callbacks need to be released manually. The disposable library provides a safe and easy way to convert the Callback into a storable SomeDisposable that can be queued up to be released after the next rendering frame.

disposable allows generic instances of Disposing to be easily created, which make it easy to create instances of Disposing for a Plan of Callbacks, and therefore for the parent container Scene, Gizmo, and Model (which may contain other widget Gizmos)

The List widget shows how the disposables can be queued for destruction after the next rendered frame.

Widget

A Glazier.React.Widget is the combination of: The Maker instruction on how to create the Model of that widget from an Outline:

mkModel :: Outline -> F (Maker Action) Model

The Maker instruction on how to create the Plan of that widget:

mkPlan :: Frame Model Plan -> F (Maker Action) Plan

The rendering instructions for that widget:

window:: WindowT (Scene Model Plan) ReactMl ()

The state changes from Action events:

gadget :: Gadget () Action (Gizmo Model Plan) (DList Command)

This is everything you need in order to serialize, deserialize, create, render and interact with a widget.

Glazier.React.IsWidget is a typeclass that provides handy XXXOf type functions to get to the type of Command, Action, Model, Plan of the Widget. It also ensures that the Model and Plan is an instance of Disposing.

This is useful for creating widgets that is composed of other Widgets.

Widget best practices

Please refer to glazier-react-widget for documentation on the best practices for creating Glazier.React.Widgets