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Here is the latest OCaml Weekly News, for the week of December 06 to 13, 2016.

  1. OASIS v0.4.8
  2. Web technologies as graphical user interface to OCaml programs?
  3. Other OCaml News

OASIS v0.4.8

Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2016-12/msg00034.html

Sylvain Le Gall announced:
I have just released OASIS 0.4.8.

OASIS is a tool to help OCaml developers to integrate configure, build and 
install systems in their projects. It should help to create standard entry 
points in the source code build system, allowing external tools to analyse 
projects easily.

Here is a quick summary of the important changes:
* Fix various problems of parsing present in OASIS 0.4.7 (extraneous
whitespaces, handling of ocamlbuild argument...)
* Enable creation of OASIS plugin and OASIS command line plugin.
* Various fixes for the plugin "omake".
* Create 2 branches to pin OASIS with OPAM, making easier for contributor to
test dev. version.

Full blog post:
http://le-gall.net/sylvain+violaine/blog/index.php?post/2016/12/06/Release-of-OASIS-0.4.8

Download here:
https://forge.ocamlcore.org/frs/?group_id=54&release_id=1247
      

Web technologies as graphical user interface to OCaml programs?

Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2016-12/msg00037.html

Matthieu Dubuget asked:
I wonder how I could use Web technologies to write OCaml program's
GUI.

I’m particularly interested by the ocaml-vdom (elm) approach
simplicity.

But my need would be to add a user interface to programs using some
OCaml libraries which are not supported by js_of_ocaml (Unix, C libs
bindings…).

One solution would be to keep the GUI-less native OCaml apps compiled
and running as native code, and have them communicate with GUIs that
would run in browsers.

I'm not sure how this communication would be done, thought? Maybe websocket,
but this is something I do not know at all…

Another solution would be to have the native OCaml app directly serve
it's UI, maybe using ocsigenserver?

I'm wondering if there are some examples around with those kind of
approaches or other kind of solution?
      
Sébastien Ferré replied:
I recently converted an application with lablgtk2-based GUI to
a web-based GUI. The body of the application has been transformed
into an XML HTTP server using ocamlnet, and the GUI has been
re-implemented using js-of-ocaml.

See http://www.irisa.fr/LIS/softwares/sewelis for description of the app, and
access to open source.
See http://www.irisa.fr/LIS/ferre/sewelis-servolis/index.html for the online Web
application.

Don't have time right now to expand, but I am very happy of the move.
      
Vincent Balat also replied:
This is precisely what Eliom is intended for. Eliom is the simplest way to
program client-server applications with an interface in a browser. The program
is written as a single code, with parts of the code being executed server-side
and other client-side. Communication between client and server is
straightforward (e.g. just call a server side function from the client).

You can now also derive the mobile app for Android and iOS from the exact same
code.

Have a look at http://ocsigen.org/tuto/dev/manual/start for how to create very
quickly a template application with code examples. (You will need to pin the dev
version of all packages — ocsigen-toolkit, ocsigen-start ... — as I think they
are still not in opam, but they will be released in very few days/hours).

For an example of running app using this have a look a http://www.besport.com or
the corresponding mobile apps:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.besport.www.mobile 
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/besport/id1104216922
      

Other OCaml News

From the ocamlcore planet blog:
Here are links from many OCaml blogs aggregated at OCaml Planet,
http://ocaml.org/community/planet/.

Eliom 6.0: mobile and Web apps in OCaml
 https://ocsigen.github.io/blog/2016/12/12/eliom6/

Migration to Github
 http://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=948

Migration to Github
 http://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=949

AFL merged!
 https://ocaml.io/w/Blog:News/AFL_merged!

Coq 8.6 rc 1 is out
 https://coq.inria.fr/news/133.html

OASIS v0.4.8 release
 http://forge.ocamlcore.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=947
      

Old cwn

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Alan Schmitt