dinosaur

Web "framework" for Scala Native with the power of RFC 3875: The Common Gateway Interface.

what does it do?

The CGI protocol is awesomely trivial: no threads, no network, no sockets, just STDIN, STDOUT, and environment variables--which happens to align with the bare-metal power of Scala Native. Dinosaur provides basic utilities for working with these primitives, but it also provides a straightforward Router API that should be familiar to anyone who's worked with Node, Flask, Sinatra, or the like.

But that's not all -- Dinosaur provides a Dockerfile for reproducible, containerized builds of your Scala Native app, as well as a built-in Apache httpd web server.

example code

package io.dinosaur.main
import io.dinosaur._

object main {
  def main(args: Array[String]): Unit = {
    Router.init()
          .get("/") { "<h1>Hello World!</h1>" }
          .get("/foo") { request => "bar" }
          .dispatch()
  }
}

how do i get it?

I'm still working on distributing Dinosaur as a Bintray package. Since that's not stable yet, I would recommend cloning this project and editing main.scala for now.(https://github.com/rwhaling/dinosaur-example-project).

You will need Git and Docker. Once you have that:

docker build -t dinosaur .
docker run -d -p 80:80 dinosaur
<app is mounted at http://localhost:80/cgi-bin/app>

Setting up Scala Native for local builds is outside the scope of this documentation, but well documented on the main Scala Native site.

lean containers

Although Scala Native produces tiny executables, the full SBT/JDK stack can push the size of an all-inclusive docker container up to about 600 MB. Dinosaur's Dockerfile uses multi-stage builds to separate the process into phases, and only copies binary artifcats into the final container. Note that this technique requires a recent version of Docker, 17.05 or newer.

TODO

• Working g8/sbt new integration
• More examples
• More documentation
• More tests
• Exception-based error code handling
• Chunked transport for streaming
• Static linking
• JSON Parsing
• HTTP Templating
• Refined API, study existing Go and Rust models
• Integrate with other web servers
• Stress-testing and tuning Apache

project status

No, seriously, this isn't an elaborate joke. I did this because I love old-school UNIX systems coding, and I did this because I love Scala and am super-stoked about Scala Native. I've also been thinking a lot about what constitutes "vanilla" Scala style, and about ergonomics for an approachable web micro-framework, all of which inform the design of this project.

That said, Scala Native is a very young project, and this is really purely speculative, research-quality, pre-release code for now. That said, I'd welcome outside contributions, issues, questions or comments.