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GEC: A Toolkit for Generic Rapid Prototyping of Type Safe Interactive Applications

  • Conference paper
Advanced Functional Programming

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNTCS,volume 3622))

Abstract

Programming GUIs with conventional GUI APIs is notoriously tedious. In these notes we present the GEC toolkit in which the programmer can create user interfaces without any knowledge of low-level I/O handling. Instead, he works with Graphical Editor Components (GEC). A GEC is an interactive component that is automatically derived from an arbitrary monomorphic data type, including higher order types. It contains a value of that data type, visualizes it, and allows the user to manipulate it in a type-safe way. The toolkit has a library of data types that represent standard GUI elements such as buttons, text fields, and so on. As a consequence, the programmer works with data types that model the interactive system that he is interested in. Programs are constructed as a collection of communicating GECs. This communication can be arranged in an ad-hoc way, or in a disciplined way, using a combinator library based on arrows. GECs are suitable for rapid prototyping of real world applications, for teaching and for debugging. These notes focus on the use of the GEC toolkit for functional programmers, only briefly explaining its inner workings and underlying principles.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nijmeegs Instituut voor Informatica en Informatiekunde, Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen, Toernooiveld 1, 6525 ED, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

    Peter Achten, Marko van Eekelen, Rinus Plasmeijer & Arjen van Weelden

Authors
  1. Peter Achten
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  2. Marko van Eekelen
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  3. Rinus Plasmeijer
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  4. Arjen van Weelden
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dept. of Computer Science, Univ. of Tartu, J. Liivi 2, EE-50409, Tartu, Estonia

    Varmo Vene

  2. Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21, EE-12618, Tallinn, Estonia

    Tarmo Uustalu

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© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Achten, P., van Eekelen, M., Plasmeijer, R., van Weelden, A. (2005). GEC: A Toolkit for Generic Rapid Prototyping of Type Safe Interactive Applications. In: Vene, V., Uustalu, T. (eds) Advanced Functional Programming. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3622. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11546382_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11546382_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-28540-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31872-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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