TryJoinads (VII.) - Implementing joinads for async workflows

The article Asynchronous workflows and joinads gives numerous examples of programming with asynchronous workflows using the match! construct. Briefly, when matching on multiple asynchronous workflows, they are executed in parallel. When pattern matching consists of multiple clauses, the clause that matches on computations that complete first gets executed. These two behaviours are implemented by the Merge and the Choose operation of joinads. Additionally, asynchronous workflows require the Alias operation, which makes it possible to share the result of a started asynchronous workflow in multiple clauses.

In this article, we look at the definition of the additional AsyncBuilder operations that enable the match! syntax. We do not look at additional examples of using the syntax, because these can be found in a previous article.

Note: This blog post is a re-publication of a tutorial from the TryJoinads.org web page. If you read the article there, you can run the examples interactively and experiment with them: view the article on TryJoinads.

TryJoinads (VI.) - Parsing with joinads

In functional programming, parser combinators are a powerful way of writing parsers. A parser is a function that, given some input, returns possible parsed values and the rest of the input. Parsers can be written using combinators for composition, for example run two parsers in sequence or perform one parser any number of times.

Parsers can also implement the monad structure. In some cases, this makes the parser less efficient, but it is an elegant way of composing parsers and we can also benefit from the syntactic support for monads. In this article, we implement a simple parser combinators for F# and we look what additional expressive power we can get from the joinad structure and match! construct. This article is largely based on a previous article "Fun with Parallel Monad Comprehensions", which can be found on the publications page.

Note: This blog post is a re-publication of a tutorial from the TryJoinads.org web page. If you read the article there, you can run the examples interactively and experiment with them: view the article on TryJoinads.

Asynchronous client/server in F# (QCon 2012)

Last week, I gave a talk on asynchronous programming in F# at London QCon 2012. The talk was a part of The Rise of Scala & Functional Programming track organized by Charles Humble. Reactive and asynchronous programming was a topic that was repeated a couple of times during the whole session - Sadek Drobi talked about non-blocking reactive web framework Play2 and Damien Katz talked about Erlang and CouchDB.

I used the one hour slot to implement "Rectangle Drawing App" - a simple application that shows how to write complete client-server application just using F#. On the server-side, I used asynchronous workflows to write HTTP server with an F# agent. On the client-side, I used asynchronous workflows to express user interface logic and the Pit project to run F# code as JavaScript that works everywhere. The app definitely had a huge commercial potential:

TryJoinads (V.) - Implementing the option joinad

This article shows how to implement the joinad structure for one of the simplest monads - the option<'T> type. This is a slightly oversimplified example. The match! construct can be used to write patterns that specify that a monadic value (in this case option<'T>) should contain a certain value, or we can specify that we do not require a value. When working with options, this means the same thing as matching the value against Some and against _, respectively.

However, the example demonstrates the operations that need to be implemented and their type signatures. Later articles give more interesting examples including parsers and asynchronous workflows (and you can explore other examples if you look at the FSharp.Joiands source code at GitHub).

Note: This blog post is a re-publication of a tutorial from the TryJoinads.org web page. If you read the article there, you can run the examples interactively and experiment with them: view the article on TryJoinads.

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