Http4s VS ZAP

http4s is a Typelevel project, and therefore falls into the "program in Scala as if it were Haskell" category. Many people find this off-putting, but honestly, I think with the resources listed above, this is the option at the best intersection of "mature" and "well-documented" available in Scala. The reason it's off-putting to many people is that Haskell-style pure FP isn't mainstream, so it isn't so much a matter of learning a new technology as it is a matter of learning a new paradigm, which necessarily means surfacing and unlearning things you already know, and perhaps confronting the uncomfortable feeling that things you thought were "fundamental," "have to be that way," aren't, and don't. I personally found this process liberating. But not everyone does.

If you want a mature REST API library, I recommend http4s. Be aware, though, that it’s based on purely-functional programming with Cats, cats-effect, and fs2, so if you’re not familiar with them or aren’t prepared to commit to the paradigm, the learning curve may be daunting, seem pointless, or both.

See also cats-effect and fs2. cats-effect gives you your IO Monad (and IOApp to run it with on supported platforms). fs2 is the ecosystem’s streaming library, which is much more pervasive in functional Scala than in Haskell. For example, http4s and Doobie are both based on fs2.

Most important/known: * https://http4s.org/ - an HTTP client/server * https://github.com/typelevel/fs2 - streaming * https://github.com/tpolecat/doobie - JDBC

Scala devs are too busy wondering about free monads and F[Request[F] => Response[F]]. I am very pleased by http4s, Doobie, ScalaJS, and the whole ecosystem, really: https://http4s.org

In reality, your performance issues will not be http4s, but something else. That being said, there are improvements that http4s can and is making, and I'm quite excited about the future 1.0 release, which has some important and fundamental performance improvements already, like a a 125% performance improvement on the plaintext benchmark from https://github.com/http4s/http4s/pull/6091 - and finally, yes, akka-http does have very good performance, but you can also get good performance out of http4s.

http4s for REST services.

This is a long list of misunderstandings I don’t have the patience to unpack. Instead, let me refer you to the links in my top comment in the thread, then suggest you learn at least http4s, a purely-functional web service library that’s been used in production for a decade or so now.

The most popular nowadays are - I guess - akka-http and http4s. You can also use Play if you don't want to start from scratch but prefer a framework-based approach.

There are functional frameworks: https://http4s.org/

I use ZAP [1] with the OAST add-on for this at the moment. I admit the UX isn't perfect, but it serves my purpose.

If I also want control over the responses (e.g. return a 401 status code for every fifth request), I have a custom extender script [2] for that.

[1]: https://www.zaproxy.org/

Implement tools like Burp Suite or OWASP ZAP for in-depth security scanning of your APIs.

OWASP ZAP

The use of capital punctuation implies a warning? an alert? Would this same response be warranted for Burp which is also a commercial, closed source product?

If this is an issue for some, then ZAP being open source[1] maybe favourable.

That said, Burp is the defacto tool for a reason - it's best in class. Every pentester I know, including myself, has a paid subscription. The fact that it's closed source hasn't been an issue.

[1] https://github.com/zaproxy/zaproxy

Briefly reviewed your product. Seems like OWASP ZAP is your competition: https://www.zaproxy.org/

It runs entirely in the browser so it uses the browser "native" frameworks.

Dynamic analysis involves testing your application while it's running. Tools like OWASP ZAP and Burp Suite can help identify vulnerabilities like SQL injection or Cross-Site Scripting by sending malicious requests to your application and analyzing the responses.

> Lying is not an embellishment or puffery, it's a lie. Engaging a company for a 3 day pen test that's totally insufficient, that would be an embellishment.

I agree, but if the RFP question was phrased "have you done penetration testing?" then that leaves a lot of room for embellishment. If the question is "do you have SOC2 certification?" and you answer "yes" untruthfully, then that is a lie. If they ask for the SOC2 or pentest report and you give them a falsified document, that's where you're (probably) committing fraud.

> One of the most important part of pen tests is that they are external.

AWS/Google/etc have internal security teams doing their pen tests, so no, this isn't true.

> Just doing your job as an engineer and looking for bugs is not a pen test.

What about an engineer spending an afternoon running ZAP[0]?

> It's like saying, "what is an audit really? We have accountants and they check our books for anomalies."

Yeah, which is why you don't just ask a company "do you keep track of your finances?" if you're investing in them, you request external auditors.

[0] https://www.zaproxy.org/

In addition to manual security reviews, you can also implement DevSecOps practices to automate security checks. For example, you can set up a CI/CD pipeline to run static code analysis tools like CodeQL and automatically run penetration tests using tools like OWASP ZAP.

OWASP ZAP (open source)

I would start by installing Burp Suite or OWASP Zap and seeing what the actual messages look like