Building Single Page Web Applications with Purescript and Erlang

When building a web app, having to use Javascript can be a thorn in your side.

From our extensive experimenting with compile-to-javascript functional languages, we bring you our favourite way of building web UIs for Erlang servers: Purescript, Halogen, and BERT (Binary ERlang Term, a binary data interchange format based on Erlang's binary serialization format).

After an overview of Purescript, and how it compares with other statically FP languages that target Javascript, we'll cover how to choose a Purescript framework, why we chose Halogen, and how using BERT instead of JSON can save you some server power (some of our servers run on embedded boards), and also fit with your Erlang code much more naturally.

Talk objectives:

• Get an overview of Purescript
• Get an overview of Halogen (Purescript framework)
• Demonstrate the use of BERT in Purescript/Erlang applications 

Target audience:

• Frontend developers who are tired of Javascript
• Developers interested in typed Functional languages for the frontend
• Developers interested in Purescript

Slides
Video

About Claudia

Claudia Doppioslash is a Functional Programmer and a gamedev. Having learned many languages, she ended up preferring strongly typed functional languages, though she's still a moderately smug LISP weenie. These days she's exploring what FP can do for industrial control systems front-ends, using Erlang and Purescript.

GitHub: doppioslash

Twitter: @doppioslash

Back to conference page