Melbourne Compose Thurs Mar 19: Ben Hutchison: Desktop user interfaces with Electron, Scala.js, Calico and Functional Reactive Programming

[Ben Hutchison]

Melbourne Compose is the monthly in-person meetup for functional programmers in Melbourne, every 3rd Thursday of the month in Carlton.

Our March meeting will be 5:30-8pm Thurs 19th Mar at our regular venue, Activity Room 2 at Kathleen Syme Center in Carlton. Arrive from 5:30 for chat and socialising, session starts 6:30pm. Please RSVP via Luma: https://luma.com/t614mbzg

Ben Hutchison will be leading a *hands-on* session on modern user-interface development using Electron, Scala.js, the Calico library, and Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) in Scala's Typelevel/Cats-Effect ecosystem. Hands on meaning "bring your laptop with Scala installed and check out the following repo":

https://github.com/benhutchison/calico_electron_tutorial

Built on top of this FRP UI library:
https://github.com/armanbilge/calico

In the session, we'll build a working desktop UI filesystem explorer that calculates the total size of files within a directory tree. We'll use functional Scala targeting the Electron platform to build the UI.

I will demonstrate:
- using functional Scala & Cats Effect to target a NodeJS runtime
- building desktop tools with web- and DOM- oriented uer interface programming
- Using the familiar DOM model for UI programming outside the web sandbox and with desktop capabilities like filesystem access
- applying FRP to solve practical problems
- from GitHub checkout to a running desktop app in under 30 minutes

As always, newcomers are welcome. Reach Ben on 407 990094 if you have trouble accessing the venue.

Hope to see you there :)
-Ben Hutchison & John Walker