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F# to Canvas
f#webliftjavascript

A rudamenary library of functions that enable F# algorithms to turn their output into visual representations using the HTML5 canvas by outputting javascript.

The setup here is from Toman Petricek & Jon Skeet's "Real World Functional Programming

What I have implements a small fraction of what canvas can do. Clearly it can be extended, and complex shapes can be defined as necessary (lablelled ellipses, for example, tree maps, networks, word clouds).

Another direction this needs to expand in is to introduce animation. I think it will be possible to lift these into behaviours (again, thanks Tomas and Jon), then with a minor change to the setup function on the hosting web page create javascript that generates animations.

After that comes interaction.

The motivation behind this is that F# is excellent for writing algorithms JavaScript is wonderful and all, but verbose and kinda boring. With this, or an extended version of it, I can use F# as a data analysis tool, and then use it to simply define their representation on the canvas.

This is also very, very minimalistic (about 40 lines of code). There is essentially no learning curve (though to extend it you have to know the canvas API).

Unfortunately I don't have the rights to upload files, or I'm too dumb, to figure out how to do so. So here's the URL to a sample page and the source

[link:stalker-wilde.com]

.

I haven't looked at this yet, but see also

[link:www.intellifactory.com]

[link:www.intellifactory.com]

By on 10/14/2010 11:26 AM ()

Yes, I looked at these, but for starters they come as part of a large commercial framework. Nothing wrong with people getting paid, but if all I want is to create canvas drawings and animations I don't need the rest of the learning curve.

More to the point, and I may be missing something here, it seems that all this is doing is allowing you to write the ridiculously verbose JavaScript in a .fs file, so that it compiles into an F# executable or library. I want to hide the JavaScript completely, so that a user of the "library" can declaratively compose arbitrarily complex canvas objects, and then have these composed into a complete drawing/animation based on data crunched by some nice, laconic, F# algorithm.

Not sure how far this will work, but it seems worth pursuing.

By on 10/15/2010 8:00 AM ()

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