I’ve been doing Node.js development for a little while, and I wanted to try my hand at writing a framework. It’s probably a rite of passage to do this, although it’s not really my first.

By releasing it today, I want to see if this is worth investing time in in the future, or if I should focus my energy elsewhere.

The project is called Curveball, and these are it’s differentiating features:

Project goals

I’m a big fan of micro-frameworks. Express was great when it came out, but it now feels a little dated. Koa was written by the team behind express. Koa makes a lot more sense in codebases that are Promise-, rather than callback-oriented, and that’s not the only improvement. The team waited with releasing a stable version, until the very moment Node.js released a stable async / await support.

I would recommend everyone to check it out. I doubt you’ll want to go back to Express after using Koa for a bit.

Koa has been my framework of choice for a while, but there were a few things I would have liked. I thought it would be an interesting to to write something that checks those boxes.

Curveball is a very minimal, like Koa. It largely follows Koa architecture and API design, with some subtle changes. Middlewares will look very familiar. It’s completely written in Typescript. It embraces modern HTTP features, it has built-in support for HTTP/2 Push, and 103 Early Hints and integrates these in a way that feel like they are a native part of the framework. It’s easy to do ‘mock’ HTTP requests inside the framework, without having to go through a real HTTP stack.

Points 3–5 are something I missed from other frameworks I’ve looked at, and why I think it might be useful to others.

Some examples:

Hello world

import { Application, Context } from '@curveball/core'; const app = new Application();

app.use((ctx: Context) => { ctx.response.body = 'Hello world! You used the following HTTP method: ' + ctx.request.method; });

app.listen(4000);

A router

import { Application } from '@curveball/core';

import router from '@curveball/router'; app.use(router('/contact', ctx => { ctx.response.body = 'Contact us!'; });

app.listen(4000);

HTTP/2 Push

Whenever you have access to the Context object, you can also push. Push will be ignored for HTTP/1 connectinons.

app.use(ctx => async { ctx.response.body = 'Hello world!'

await ctx.response.push( pushCtx => { // This function is not called unless the client indicated

// they support push.

// You get a special Context object that has a request and

// response.

pushCtx.request.path = '/assets/foo.css';

pushCtx.response.type = 'text/css';

pushCtx.response.body = 'body { background: blue; }'; }); })

The above example allows you to programatically generate pushes, which allows you to make certain optimizations that are hard to do with HTTP/2 push implementations that are based on intercepting the Link: header.

However, if you want to push a request and response that goes through the entire middleware stack, you can do that with a sub-request:

app.use(ctx => async { ctx.response.body = 'Hello world!'

await ctx.response.push( pushCtx => { pushCtx.request.path = '/assets/foo.css';

// Handle does an internal sub request and calls every

// middleware.

return app.handle(pushCtx); }); });

Sending a 103 Early Hints response

app.use(ctx => async { ctx.response.body = 'Hello world!'

ctx.response.sendInformational(103, {

'Link' : [

'</style.css> rel="prefetch" as="style"',

'</script.js> rel="prefetch" as="script"',

]

}); });

Middleware upgrades

If you’re coming from Express, you’re also getting all the benefits that Koa would have given you too. So this is not really a selling point for just Curveball.

Try to write the following middleware with express:

app.use( async (ctx, next) => { // Let the entire middleware stack run

await next();



// HTML encode JSON responses if the client was a browser.

if (ctx.accepts('text/html')

&& ctx.response.type ==== 'application/json') { ctx.response.type = 'text/html';

ctx.response.body = '<h1>JSON source</h1><pre>' +

JSON.stringify(ctx.response.body) + '</pre>'; } });

Where to get Curveball

You can find it on Github project page.

What can I do?

If I’m the only user, the project is dead in the water and I’ll probably stop working on it and convert my projects back to Koa.

If you think this is worth maintaining, I would love to know. DM me on twitter, or write me an email!

If you’re interested in helping, there’s lots to do. I would love to not be the single point of failure.

Thanks for making it all the way to the bottom!