okapi VS Suave.IO

TL;DR - Okapi, a web framework that I started working on last year, now uses an Applicative instead of a Monad. This has made the framework a lot more consistent and easier to understand. It also makes it possible to automatically generate OpenAPI specifications from your endpoint definitions. It should be possible to generate clients as well, but I haven't worked on this yet. You can learn more at the new documentation website: https://okapi.wiki/. Would you use Okapi? What do you think? I'd love to hear it.

Me showing off Okapi (hopefully): Okapi is simple. A functor can do this, applicative can do this, a monad can do this. Learn this small set of functions. Sequence them with do. Branch them with <|>. You need to learn the structure of an HTTP request, but that's good because you need to know that anyway if you want to develop Web apps. Here's the documentation. Look at how simple and compact this is compared to this.

This is cool. I just want to give a shoutout to Suave, which is the original inspiration for Giraffe, and is still my go-to web server in F#.

This shouldn't be that hard, I just needed a server that well... served the HTML/CSS/JS files right? I went to my desktop, created an F# script added a couple of libraries like Suave and CliWrap so I could call the dotnet fable command from my F# code and make it compile my Fable files.

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.