Perla VS Saturn

Does that import map thing feel familiar? well maybe I spoke about that a few months ago when I wrote about a project of mine (Perla) which uses import maps to allow you to write Single Page Applications without node installed!

If you need to handle dependencies via CDN/Local Dist file then some dependencies won't work because they use node like imports import {} from 'lit/some/sub/directory.js browser imports need to start with / or ./ or even ../ so they can be valid ES module imports thankfully for this you can check out in a shameless plug one of the projects I'm working on: Perla which handles this precise case but I digress, the ideal situation would be you with npm and already figured out how to serve node dependencies to your compiled code.

The most "complex" application would be a webpack alternative in F#: AngelMunoz/Perla and maybe a simple migrations manager AngelMunoz/Migrondi

Not the author, but it doesn't seem like you'll need dotnet installed from the docs

Whew! That was a lot! but shows how to build each part of the Webpack alternative I've been working on Called Perla there are still some gaps though

I keep working on Perla :) https://github.com/AngelMunoz/Perla

I've been working in perla which is a cross-platform executable frontend dev-server/build-tool which is not tied to Nodejs or .NET meaning that you don't need to have .NET installed and neither Nodejs, at the same time it doesn't use npm or other things to handle dependencies it does so by leveraging skypack and import maps to let you use npm dependencies but from a CDN rather than locally.

Today I don't have a new series to start with but rather a simple example which may or may not grow in another blog series. For the moment we'll talk about how to do File uploads to an F# backend powered by Falco and Saturn so let's get started!

Bix is a micro-framework designed with F# in mind and that runs on both Deno and Bun! and in theory it also should even run in a service worker! (intercepting fetch requests) although I haven't tested that yet, it offers a general purpose handler that coupled with a set of route definitions it can bring a Giraffe/Saturn like framework to life in JavaScript runtimes which is incredibly awesome! useful? maybe not 😅, but awesome indeed. Let's see some code for it

Backend: Most likely it would be a toss between https://saturnframework.org or https://giraffe.wiki. They both combins the extremely good type system in F# combined with the ease of a minimal API.

The "S" stands for Saturn. Suave is not very popular.

While for a proof of concept Suave did great, I switched it in favor of Saturn given my familiarity with it and some ASP.NET code.

Saturn is heavily inspired by phoenix and has similar generators, and a channel system that is similar. As well as almost the exact same syntax for the router with plugs and all.

Today we'll try to keep it as simple as possible but no promises, since this entry is about creating web servers in F# using Saturn and not only that, we'll also try to go for a more traditional'ish MVC.

🌱release on github