examQuestionCore VS Giraffe

I use this to distribute exams to my students https://github.com/rtbsoft/examQuestionCore

Have a look at what I've done here: https://github.com/rtbsoft/examQuestionCore . I'm all for the right level of complexity and accessing dbContext in the controller is just fine. I've worked on a project with a DTO layer and an Repository layer and interfaces everywhere and it just ended up that every change required touching multiple files and running automated tools (which sometimes failed on the build server) -- with almost no gain in security or any other metric I could think of. KISS

Here's a project I created for teaching purposes: https://github.com/rtbsoft/examQuestionCore Hope you can learn something by studying this code.

My front end tool of choice is Vue. You can see the combo here: https://github.com/rtbsoft/examQuestionCore and here: https://github.com/rtbsoft/examQuestionVue.

Giraffe is another interesting one to explore: https://giraffe.wiki/

Giraffe is nice because it is itself built "just" as ASP.NET Core Middleware so it plays a bit more nicely than Suave with a mixed stack of C#-defined Middleware.

It's more likely you accidentally fall back into just translating C# patterns to non-idiomatic F# with Giraffe, but it's also nicer when in that case of needing to live in both worlds and use a mixture of libraries built for C# ASP.NET projects.

There are also some F# frameworks built on top of ASP.NET core like https://giraffe.wiki

If you have an interest in F#, I highly recommend diving in because (1) it has a ton of things you might learn to appreciate in C#; (2) it has things C# cannot have. I do like some of the suggestions people have made regarding mixing your code bases, but I'll also say that building, say, endpoint routing in Giraffe is (to repeat myself) easy, simple, and elegant.

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.

I was wondering if its possible to simultaneously run a C# core MVC project in combination with https://github.com/giraffe-fsharp/Giraffe

By default Giraffe, the framework which I use as a web server, uses Newtonsoft.Json to serialize results to JSON. However, for discriminated union, it generates quite a lot of JSON so I've switched to System.Text.Json which is built into newer versions of .Net Core. In combination with FSharp.SystemTextJson package allows serializing discriminated unions more gracefully. All we need is to decorate Branch type with JsonFSharpConverter(JsonUnionEncoding.BareFieldlessTags) attribute.

Giraffe is a library that sits atop ASP.NET Core and allows developers to build web applications in a functional style; dotnet new giraffe is literally my starting point when I begin a new web application project. (Rather than write three more sentences filled with effusive praise, I’ll just leave it at that; it’s great.) It also provides a view engine (that builds upon Suave‘s “experimental” view engine) which uses an F# DSL to define HTML in a strongly-typed way. It has been incredibly efficient for a while, but with .NET’s work over the past two releases at improving performance, and Giraffe’s adoption of those techniques, it is lightning fast.

Wrapping ASP.NET Core to be easier and more idiomatic with F# seems to be a common domain. Out of curiosity, did you look at any existing projects? If so, what was lacking from them that made you decide to write WebFrame?

Giraffe: https://github.com/giraffe-fsharp/Giraffe