Functors (Yorgey IX) & Open Data and Rapid App Development with Haskell

Introduction to Haskell IX - Brenton Alker

We've seen Lists, Trees and IO. But what have they got in common?

It turns out, lots!

In this section we'll introduce the Functor type class to allow us to write generic functions that work for all of these types, and many more! Functor is one of many powerful abstractions commonly used in Haskell to make our code concise and expressive, and save us from boring repetition.

Haskell, open data and rapid app development - Fraser Tweedale

Learn what happened when BFPG took on the GovHack open data competition. Ben, Sean and Fraser entered the GovHack 2014 open data competition to see what they could build in a weekend using Haskell. Brisbane Park Finder (http://brisparks.info/) - a site for searching for parks in Brisbane based on location and facilities - was born.

This presentation will:

• Explain why we are passionate about Haskell, types and functional programming.

• Discuss some implementation details of Brisbane Park Finder including import of the datasets, and request processing and markup generation via the Snap (http://snapframework.com/) web framework. Useful features of Snap and some other libraries will be discussed. No prior Haskell or functional programming knowledge required.

• Discuss how we benefited from using Haskell and strong types during the competition, and identify the pain points and places where type safety was not accomplished, along with the reasons why.

• Outline in brief the state of platform support and options for deploying Haskell applications.

• Encourage people to come on board for GovHack 2015!