The yesterdays second Haskell in Leipzig Meeting (HaL) was just great. As last time we reached the limits of our conference room we decided to arrange the next Haskell meeting at Victor Jara. This was the absolutely right decision. We had a pleasant ambience in the cellar of the old Leipziger Felsenkeller. The team of Victor Jara prepared us a really great conference atmosphere - so, many thanks and compliments to you, Lütti.
The first talk was hold by Johan Jeuring (Univ. Utrecht) who gave an overview over Generic Programming in Haskell. He presented a field of his actual work: Finding criteria for a standardized Generic Programming library for Haskell. At the end of this talk he gave yet another hint for this year's functional programming contest.
After him talked Wolfgang Jeltsch (TU Cottbus) about Grapefruit, a declarative aproach to program user interfaces by adopting two concepts of the signal theory: signals and event streams utilizing Haskells Arrow and ArrowLoop classes. Grapefruit is in an early stage and Wolfgang is looking for people interestred in helping him with development.
After a rustical dinner (sliced bread with lard and sandwiches) we heard generated synthesizer sounds composed by Henning Thielemann (Uni-Halle) by writing Haskell code with Haskore. He managed to control different sound engines (CSound, Midi, SuperCollider) to produce sounds between experimental industrial and music of the 60th and 70th.
The last talk was hold by Leif Frenzel (Karlsruhe). After leaving the first Haskell Meeting he was not passive and developed Cohatoe, a set of Eclipse plugins to "contribute haskell code to eclipse" which means, that with the help of his work it is now possible to write some parts of an Eclipse plugin in pure Haskell. He wrote nice wizards to generate the Java part of these plugins and now any Haskell developer can start to write Haskell based Eclipse Plugins even without knowing how to do it in Java. As he said, some of the design decisions he made were inspired by the last discussion on HaL1 (e.g. the out of process execution of the Haskell code based on hs-plugins).
In the later part of the evening all participants used the opportunity to discuss Haskell related problems in smaller groups. In a discussion with Leif about Eclipse and OSGi, I pointed out, that by providing Cohatoe not only to the Eclipse platform but also to the whole OSGi Framework, it would be easy to develop OSGi bundles in Haskell. This would give developers of business applications the possiblity to use Haskell to compute critical business logic without leaving the Java world which is used to implement user interfaces and connectivity. Leif said, converting his infrastructure from Eclipse Plugins (and Plugin Extentions) to OSGi bundles should not be that hard.
We recorded all talks on video tape. Many thanks to our cinematographer Katrin for recording five hours without resting and sitting down. We plan to make the videos available through the internet. I have to figure out how to use Google video and/or Youtube. Hope, they support patent-free video formats.