Circlet and Usher Small Web App Libraries for Scala

Circlet and Usher are two small Scala libraries I have been working on for fun recently. Circlet is like Ring, but for Scala. Usher is a small routing library built on top of Circlet, and is very much like Compojure.

These libraries encourage building web apps (REST endpoints, microservices, etc.) by composing simple functions of type Request => Option[Response] , and using higher order functions ( Middleware ) to layer on reusable functionality.

Circlet Features

Few features

Minimal core concepts: Request , Response , Handler , Middleware

, , , Uses Scala idioms case classes with immutable data optional things use Option functional style

Few dependencies

Ok, the last point is a bit of a lie because currently Jetty is required, and it’s not small. But, having used it to handle billions of requests over the past several years I’m comfortable forcing Jetty on people as a starting point.

Usher Features

no external tools, just a library

simple routing syntax

composable routes

Simple examples

First, the important types are:

type Cont = Option [ Response ] => Sent . type type Handler = Request => Cont => Sent . type // roughly: Request => Option[Response] type Middleware = Handler => Handler

Request and Response are case classes containing the things you’d expect. Handler is the workhorse, and like the comment above says, you can get by thinking of it as having type Request => Option[Response] . Cont may require some explanation: Circlet uses continuation passing style (CPS), and Cont is the type of the continuation function. There is more about CPS on the Circlet GitHub page, so I won’t say more about it here.

As a point of reference, here’s a Circlet app messing around with cookies:

val h = Circlet . handler { req => Cookies . get ( req , "id" ) match { case None => val id = Random . nextInt ( 1000000 ) val body = s "No id yet, going to set $id (5 second ttl)" val c = Cookie ( value = id . toString , maxAge = Some ( new Duration ( 5000 ))) Cookies . add ( Response ( body = body ), "id" , c ) case Some ( id ) => Response ( body = s "Id is $id" ) } } val mw : Middleware = Head . mw . andThen ( Cookies . mw ()) val app : Handler = mw ( h ) JettyAdapter . run ( app )

(full listing)

And here’s what a single route looks like in Usher:

val r : Handler = GET ( "/saying/:id{\\d+}" ) { req => for { params <- Usher . get ( req ) id <- params . getInt ( "id" ) result <- db . get ( id ) } yield Response ( body = result ) }

There’s some boilerplate in unpacking params and id in the above Usher example: if the routing works (and it does), they’re guaranteed non- None in that code. However, it’s not too painful as-is, reads easily, and fits the familiar for comprehension syntax well. I have an idea for an uglier-but-more-type-safe route syntax in the future.

(full listing)

Why yet another web framework?

Having spent a number of years with Scala web frameworks, then some more with Ring, the idea of returning to the former (which I’ve always found complicated) was depressing. I didn’t want to give up writing web apps as compositions of Handler functions. So I decided to port Ring. And if you’re going to port Ring, you might as well port Compojure too.

Also, I just wanted to do it, and it was fun.

Current Status

These projects are new, but they should be quite usable. If you do try them out for anything, I’d love any feedback. Please drop me a line here or on Twitter or GitHub.

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