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Sunroof: A Monadic DSL for Generating JavaScript

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Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL 2014)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 8324))

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Abstract

Sunroof is a Haskell-hosted Domain Specific Language (DSL) for generating JavaScript. The central feature of Sunroof is a JavaScript monad, which, like the Haskell IO-monad, allows access to external resources, but specifically JavaScript resources. As such, Sunroof is primarily a feature-rich foreign-function API to the browser’s JavaScript engine, and all the browser-specific functionality, including HTML-based rendering, event handling, and drawing to the HTML5 canvas element.

In this paper, we give the design and implementation of Sunroof. Using monadic reification, we generate JavaScript from a deep embedding of the JavaScript monad. The Sunroof DSL has the feel of native Haskell, with a simple Haskell-based type schema to guide the Sunroof programmer. Furthermore, because we are generating code, we can offer Haskell-style concurrency patterns, such as MVars and Channels. In combination with a web-services package, the Sunroof DSL offers a robust platform to build interactive web applications.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut für Informatik, Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel, Germany

    Jan Bracker

  2. ITTC / EECS, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Andy Gill

Authors
  1. Jan Bracker
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  2. Andy Gill
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computing, University of Utah, 50 Central Campus Drive, 84112-9205, Salt Lake City, UT, USA

    Matthew Flatt

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Nebraska, 6001 Dodge Street, 68182, Omaha, NE, USA

    Hai-Feng Guo

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Bracker, J., Gill, A. (2014). Sunroof: A Monadic DSL for Generating JavaScript. In: Flatt, M., Guo, HF. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8324. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04132-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04132-2_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-04131-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-04132-2

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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