Haskell on mobile devices

An environment to build apps for mobile devices, Android & iOS, with bindings to all of the native SDKs including UIs all in Haskell. Note that while this is functional, as in one can in principle build any app with full access to all of the Android/iOS APIs, it's still in its early days. Right now only one example project is provided and it doesn't integrate with the native UI designers (e.g., Android Studio). This integration is the last major technical missing piece.

The example project provided is a straightforward port of the Nativescript hello world template. A button and some labels. Note that this isn't good Haskell code! And isn't meant to be such. It sticks by the conventions and layout of the original in order to make it easier to understand how it was ported. Run tns create hello in a directory other than the repo to get the original hello world example.

We use GHCJS to compile down to Javascript and Nativescript to bind to the Android/iOS APIs. Nativescript did much of the heavy lifting of providing bindings for all of the Android and iOS APIs in Javascript as well as figuring out how to bundle V8 on those platforms.

The basics presented here can be reused for iOS. Indeed as long as an app doesn't use platform-specific APIs it should be portable. But I don't have any iOS devices so this is all untested on that platform.

Docker containers are provided with all the tools required. Some images are quite large, like the GHCJS one, and may take a while to download.

Running

N.B: As mentioned earlier this is still in its early stages. Rough corners and bleeding edges await.

You'll need two containers, one with Stackage and GHCJS and the other with Nativescript.

docker pull abarbu/nativescript
docker pull abarbu/stack-ghcjs-nativescript:lts-3.0

We'll be the running from inside the containers so lets set up some aliases

alias tns='docker run -it --rm --privileged --net=host -v /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb -v $PWD:/src abarbu/nativescript tns'
alias logcat='docker run -it --rm --privileged --net=host -v /dev/bus/usb:/dev/bus/usb -v $PWD:/src abarbu/nativescript pidcat'
alias ghcjs='docker run -it --rm -v $PWD:/src abarbu/stack-ghcjs-nativescript:lts-3.0 ghcjs'

Lets try the simple Hello World app that Nativescript ships with and we've ported to Haskell.

cd hello
tns platform add android
cd app
ghcjs App.hs
tns run android

Your android phone has to be hooked up for this to work and you can't have a running adb server on the host (there might be version skew between the container and the host resulting in a real mess). If in doubt just run adb kill-server. Right now the emulator segfaults on startup on my machine but instructions for how to install it are in the android docker file and you can just run tns run android --emulate. Note that as usual you'll have to enable USB debugging and accept it permanently for your machine.

This should start up the app on your phone. For development it's much easier if we automate things a bit. I run each of the 3 commands in separate terminals.

cd hello; tns livesync android --watch
logcat org.nativescript.hello
cd hello/app; nodemon --exec "ghcjs" *.hs

The code of the app is in App.hs. You can have as many modules as you want and they will be linked in as usual. In NativeScript app.js contains the main entry point to the activity. The rest of the code is distributed in views which each have css, js, and xml files. For the Haskell case all of the code lives in the app.js file and the js files for the views just refer to it. Check out the example app to see how this works but it's totally trivial and mechanical.

Rebuilding the docker containers

In case you want to build your own containers you can get a copy of the docker files from https://github.com/abarbu/haskell-mobile and rebuild with:

docker build -t abarbu/java:8 java
docker build -t abarbu/android:22 android
docker build -t abarbu/node.js:0.12 node.js
docker build -t abarbu/nativescript nativescript
docker build -t abarbu/stack-ghcjs-nativescript:lts-3.0 stack-ghcjs-nativescript

This package is distributed under the MIT License

Copyright (c) 2015 Andrei Barbu andrei@0xab.com