Thursday, November 20, 2014

A monad for reactive programming Part 2

Some time has passed since I published the first part of this tutorial. The time has been spent in achieving a deeper understanding of events and event processing. In this second part I solve the problems of the simple approach depicted at the end of the part 1.
The motivating example to solve is the same, a console application with a basic event scheduler, a monadic computation that has some statements which wait for different kinds of events. You can run the two examples here in the tutorial.
This tutorial also can be considered as the description of an event sourcing mechanism without inversion of control. A event sourcing application is basically a set of event handlers for each type of event with a central state. A functional reactive mechanism is a single event handler with event preprocessing on top. while a monadic reactive mechanism like this is a monadic computation that automatically generates a cascade of event handlers.
Besides monadic reactive, I will demonstrate more classical functional reactive behaviour using applicative combinators, and how to mix monadic, reactive and alternative to mimic the creation of new signals with thresholds etc.

The tutorial and running examples are in the School of Haskell

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