FP Complete Offers Haskell Dev Tools Free for Open Development

FP Complete, a provider of commercial Haskell software tools and services, announced it is moving to an open publish model for their integrated development environment (IDE) for the Haskell programming language.

FP Complete’s Haskell development platform, the FP Haskell Center (FPHC), eliminates barriers to learning and developing in Haskell. It provides a Web-based IDE that requires no setup or install to begin using and deployment services for testing and running applications.

By making FPHC free to developers of openly published projects and releasing additional features with the free service, FP Complete is establishing its commitment to open source Haskell development. The new, simplified licensing model is familiar to Haskell developers and GitHub users, the company said.

The new licensing will provide developers with free access to FPHC features like complete git command line integration for Emacs clients as well as git “mega repos,” and inter-project dependencies will be free. Free accounts will automatically publish all projects on the FPHC site with each commit and free accounts do not include access to the shared FP Application Server.

“Being able to offer more services for free to the Haskell community has always been a part of FP Complete’s long term mission,” said FP Complete’s founder and CEO Aaron Contorer, in a statement. “Because of the early success we’ve been able to achieve, we’ve reached this milestone sooner than we anticipated. We’re confident the hard work of our team will inspire others and we believe this move will better suit open-source projects and independent developers.”

Last month, FP Complete announced the launch of its first commercial product developed on FPHC, the company’s Integrated Analysis Platform (IAP). IAP was designed for developers focused on building data analysis into their applications. It gives them the ability to use the same language on a single platform from start to finish increasing their speed, accuracy and performance, the company said.

“It’s notable that IAP is the first commercial product we’ve built with our IDE,” said Contorer. “We launched FPHC in the fall of 2013 to bring better Haskell tools to market. Now it’s time to prove what we can achieve and to create products around specific business problems we know we can add value to with Haskell.”

FPHC also is the home of the FP Complete interactive education resource, the School of Haskell. Users can create and edit Haskell projects within the IDE, as well as open existing projects directly from Git or the Web. In addition, the IDE offers continuous display of type and error information and type auto-completion, Hoogle and Haddock integration, an easy-to-use build system, simplified error messages as well as vetted and stable libraries.