My new Pluralsight course, A Functional Architecture with F#, is now available.

Whenever I've talked to object-oriented developers about F#, a common reaction has been that it looks enticing, but that they don't see how they'd be able to build a 'normal' application with it. F# has gained a reputation for being a 'niche' language, good for scientific computation and financial calculations, but not useful for mainstream applications.

Not only is F# a Turing-complete, general purpose programming language, but it has many advantages to offer compared to, say, C#. That said, though, building a 'normal' application with F# will only make sense if you know how to work with the language, and define an architecture that takes advantage of all it has to offer. Therefore, I thought that it would be valuable to show one possible way to do this, through a comprehensive example.

This was the motivation behind my new Pluralsight course A Functional Architecture with F#, which is now available! In it, you'll see extensive code demos of a web application written entirely in F# (and a bit of GUI in JavaScript, but the course only shows the F# code).

If you don't already have a Pluralsight account, you can get a free trial of up to 200 minutes.


Comments

...you'll see extensive code demos of a web application written entirely in F#...

What about a desktop applications written entirely in F#? When you create a desktop applciation in F#, what do you use to create the GUI?

I am currently writting my first application in F# and need to decide what we will use to create the GUI. There seems to be many ways this could be done.

  1. For simplicity, I started using WPF with the code-behind written in C#. I am satisifed with this initial (temporary) GUI for now, but the C#/F# interop is ugly to read and painful to write.
  2. I could sitck with WPF but write the code-behind in F#. I found two ways to do this:
    1. FsXaml and
    2. Elmish.WPF.
  3. Another possibility is the video game engine Unity.
  4. I also found a XAML-based approach called Avalonia. However, their website says they are "currently in a beta phase, which means that the framework is generally usable for writing applications, but there may be some bugs and breaking changes as we continue development."

There are probably many more that I missed as well.

Among these, Elmish.WPF stands out to me. Their page commnicates a strong ethos, which I find both enticing and convincing. The core idea seems to be the Elm Architecture, which I have also seen expressed as the MVU architecture, where MVU stands for Model, View, Update.

Have you come across that architecture before? I am very interested to hear your opinion about it.

P.S. Also worth mentioning is Fabulous, which uses Xamarin.Forms, so this seems like a good choice for mobile app development.

2019-08-04 01:15 UTC

Tyson, thank you for writing. I haven't done any desktop application development in ten years, so I don't think I'm qualified to make recommendations.

2019-08-04 9:34 UTC

Do your web applications include GUIs? If so, what UI framework(s) do you like to use there (such as Angular, React, Elm, etc.)?

P.S. I have been investigating Elmish.WPF and love what I have found. The Elm / MVU / Model, View, Update architecture seems to be a specific (or the ultimate?) applicaiton of the functional programming prinicple of pushing impure behavior to the boundry of the applicaiton.

2019-08-22 18:40 UTC

Tyson, seriously, I think that the last time I wrote any GUI code was with Angular some time back in 2014, after which I walked away in disgust. Since then, I've mostly written REST APIs, with the occasional daemon and console application thrown in here and there.

Many of the REST APIs I've helped develop are consumed by apps with GUIs, but someone else developed those, and I wasn't involved.

2019-08-22 20:35 UTC


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Published

Wednesday, 22 January 2014 22:48:00 UTC

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Published: Wednesday, 22 January 2014 22:48:00 UTC