Finding the Free Way

Free Monads are quickly being adopted as the best technique for developing in a pure functional style. Unfortunately, the details for how to best apply them is often left as "an exercise for the reader." Recently my team began using Free Monads to build Web Services within the Play Framework. We wanted to use Free Monads in an easy to follow way with minimum boilerplate, while still slotting naturally into the Play Framework. In this talk I'll outline how we took some wrong turns, hit a few potholes, but ultimately found a way to use Free that works for us.